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The conversion of a sum of money into means of production and labour-power, is the
first step taken by the quantum of value that is going to function as capital. This
conversion takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. The second
step, the process of production, is complete so soon as the means of production have
been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts,
and, therefore, contains the capital originally advanced, plus a surplus-value. These
commodities must then be thrown into circulation. They must be sold, their value realised
in money, this money afresh converted into capital, and so over and over again. This
circular movement, in which the same phases are continually gone through in succession,
forms the circulation of capital.

The first condition of accumulation is that the capitalist must have contrived to
sell his commodities, and to reconvert into capital the greater part of the money
so received. In the following pages we shall assume that capital circulates in its
normal way. The detailed analysis of the process will be found in Book II.

The capitalist who produces surplus-value — i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities,
is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value.
He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, &c., who fulfil other functions
in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various
parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms,
independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants' profit, rent,
&c. It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value.

On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the commodities
he has produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new forms that capital
assumes while in the sphere of circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction
hidden under these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner
of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative of all the
sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider accumulation from
an abstract point of view — i.e., as a mere phase in the actual process of production.

So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling
his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital. Moreover, the breaking-up
of surplus-value into fragments neither alters its nature nor the conditions under
which it becomes an element of accumulation. Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value
which the industrial capitalist retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is
the one who, in the first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more
than what actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of
the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation which brings
it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the process,
therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that hide the
pity of its inner mechanism.

Whatever the form of the process of production in a society, it must be a continuous
process, must continue to go periodically through the same phases. A society can no
more cease to produce than it can cease to consumer When viewed, therefore, as a connected
whole, and as flowing on with incessant renewal, every social process of production
is, at the same time, a process of reproduction.

The conditions of production are also those of reproduction. No society can go on
producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts
a part of its products into means of production, or elements of fresh products. All
other circumstances remaining the same, the only mode by which it can reproduce its
wealth, and maintain it at one level, is by replacing the means of production — i.e., the instruments of labour, the raw material, and the auxiliary substances consumed
in the course of the year-by an equal quantity of the same kind of articles; these
must be separated from the mass of the yearly products, and thrown afresh into the
process of production. Hence, a definite portion of each year's product belongs to
the domain of production. Destined for productive consumption from the very first,
this portion exists, for the most part, in the shape of articles totally unfitted
for individual consumption.

If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. Just as in the
former the labour-process figures but as a means towards the self-expansion of capital,
so in the latter it figures but as a means of reproducing as capital — i.e., as self-expanding value — the value advanced. It is only because his money constantly
functions as capital that the economic guise of a capitalist attaches to a man. If,
for instance, a sum of £100 has this year been converted into capital. and produced
a surplus-value of £20, it must continue during next year, and subsequent years, to
repeat the same operation. As a periodic increment of the capital advanced, or periodic
fruit of capital in process, surplus-value acquires the form of a revenue flowing
out of capital. [1]

If this revenue serve the capitalist only as a fund to provide for his consumption,
and be spent as periodically as it is gained, then, caeteris paribus, simple reproduction will take place. And although this reproduction is a mere repetition
of the process of production on the old scale, yet this mere repetition, or continuity,
gives a new character to the process, or, rather, causes the disappearance of some
apparent characteristics which it possessed as an isolated discontinuous process.

The purchase of labour-power for a fixed period is the prelude to the process of production;
and this prelude is constantly repeated when the stipulated term comes to an end,
when a definite period of production, such as a week or a month, has elapsed. But
the labourer is not paid until after he has expended his labour-power, and realised
in commodities not only its value, but surplus-value. He has, therefore, produced
not only surplus-value, which we for the present regard as a fund to meet the private
consumption of the capitalist, but he has also produced, before it flows back to him
in the shape of wages, the fund out of which he himself is paid, the variable capital;
and his employment lasts only so long as he continues to reproduce this fund. Hence,
that formula of the economists, referred to in Chapter XVIII,, which represents wages
as a share in the product itself. [2] What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product
that is continuously reproduced by him. The capitalist, it is true, pays him in money,
but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour. While he
is converting a-portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his
former product is being turned into money. It is his labour of last week, or of last
year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this year. The illusion begotten
by the intervention of money vanishes immediately, if, instead of taking a single
capitalist and a single labourer, we take the class of capitalists and the class of
labourers as a whole. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the labouring class
order-notes, in the form of money, on a portion of the commodities produced by the
latter and appropriated by the former. The labourers give these order-notes back just
as constantly to the capitalist class, and in this way get their share of their own
product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form
of the commodity.

Variable capital is therefore only a particular historical form of appearance of the
fund for providing the necessaries of life, or the labour-fund which the labourer
requires for the maintenance of himself and family, and which, whatever be the system
of social production, he must himself produce and reproduce. If the labour-fund constantly
flows to him in the form of money that pays for his labour, it is because the product
he has created moves constantly away from him in the form of capital. But all this
does not alter the fact, that it is the labourer's own labour, realised in a product,
which is advanced to him by the capitalist. [3] Let us take a peasant liable to do compulsory service for his lord. He works on his
own land, with his own means of production, for, say, 3 days a week. The 3 other days
he does forced work on the lord's domain. He constantly reproduces his own labour-fund,
which never, in his case, takes the form of a money payment for his labour, advanced
by another person. But in return, his unpaid forced labour for the lord, on its side,
never acquires the character of voluntary paid labour. If one fine morning the lord
appropriates to himself the land, the cattle, the seed, in a word, the, means of production
of this peasant, the latter will thenceforth be obliged to sell his labour-power to
the lord. He will, ceteris paribus, labour 6 days a week as before, 3 for himself, 3 for his lord, who thenceforth becomes a
wages-paying capitalist. As before, he will use up the means of production as means
of production, and transfer their value to the product. As before, a definite portion
of the product will be devoted to reproduction. But from the moment that the forced
labour is changed into wage-labour. from that moment the labour-fund, which the peasant himself continues as before to produce and reproduce, takes the form of a
capital advanced in the form of wages by the lord. The bourgeois economist whose narrow
mind is unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing that appears, shuts
his eyes to the fact, that it is but here and there on the face of the earth, that
even now-a-days the labour-fund crops up in the form of capital. [4]

Variable capital, it is true, only then loses its character of a value advanced out
of the capitalist's funds, [5] when we view the process of capitalist production in the flow of its constant renewal.
But that process must have had a beginning of some kind. From our present standpoint
it therefore seems likely that the capitalist, once upon a time, became possessed
of money, by some accumulation that took place independently of the unpaid labour
of others, and that this was, therefore, how he was enabled to frequent the market
as a buyer of labour-power. However this may be, the mere continuity of the process,
the simple reproduction, brings about some other wonderful changes, which affect not
only the variable, but the total capital.

If a capital of £1,000 beget yearly a surplus-value of £200, and if this surplus-value
be consumed every year, it is clear that at the end of 5 years the surplus-value consumed
will amount to 5 x £200 or the £1,000 originally advanced. If only a part, say one
half, were consumed, the same result would follow at the end of 10 years, since 10
x £100= £1,000. General Rule: The value of the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value
annually consumed, gives the number of years, or reproduction periods, at the expiration
of which the capital originally advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has
disappeared. The capitalist thinks, that he is consuming the produce of the unpaid
labour of others, i.e., the surplus-value, and is keeping intact his original capital; but what he thinks
cannot alter facts. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the capital value
he then possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value appropriated by him
during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to that of his original
capital. It is true, he has in hand a capital whose amount has not changed, and of
which a part, viz., the buildings, machinery, &c., were already there when the work
of his business began. But what we have to do with here, is not the material elements,
but the value, of that capital. When a person gets through all his property, by taking
upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property
represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the capitalist;
when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present
capital represents nothing but the total amount of the surplus-value appropriated
by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues
to exist.

Apart then from all accumulation, the mere continuity of the process of production,
in other words simple reproduction, sooner or later, and of necessity, converts every
capital into accumulated capital, or capitalised surplus-value. Even if that capital
was originally acquired by the personal labour of its employer, it sooner or later
becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised
either in money or in some other object. We saw in Chapt. IV.-VI. that in order to
convert money into capital something more is required than the production and circulation
of commodities. We saw that on the one side the possessor of value or money, on the
other, the possessor of the value-creating substance; on the one side, the possessor
of the means of production and subsistence, on the other, the possessor of nothing
but labour-power, must confront one another as buyer and seller. The separation of
labour from its product, of subjective labour-power from the objective conditions
of labour, was therefore the real foundation in fact, and the starting-point of capitalist
production.

But that which at first was but a starting-point, becomes, by the mere continuity
of the process, by simple reproduction, the peculiar result, constantly renewed and
perpetuated, of capitalist production. On the one hand, the process of production
incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into means of creating more wealth
and means of enjoyment for the capitalist. On the other hand, the labourer, on quitting the process, is what he was on entering
it, a source of wealth, but devoid of all means of making that wealth his own. Since,
before entering on the process, his own labour has already been alienated from himself
by the sale of his labour-power, has been appropriated by the capitalist and incorporated
with capital, it must, during the process, be realised in a product that does not
belong to him. Since the process of production is also the process by which the capitalist
consumes labour-power, the product of the labourer is incessantly converted, not only
into commodities, but into capital, into value that sucks up the value-creating power,
into means of subsistence that buy the person of the labourer, into means of production
that command the producers. [6] The labourer therefore constantly produces material, objective wealth, but in the
form of capital, of an alien power that dominates and exploits him: and the capitalist
as constantly produces labour-power, but in the form of a subjective source of wealth,
separated from the objects in and by which it can alone be realised; in short he produces
the labourer, but as a wage-labourer. [7] This incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ non
of capitalist production.

The labourer consumes in a two-told way. While producing he consumes by his labour
the means of production, and converts them into products with a higher value than
that of the capital advanced This is his productive consumption. It is at the same
time consumption of his labour-power by the capitalist who bought it. On the other
hand, the labourer turns the money paid to him for his labour-power, into means of
subsistence: this is his individual consumption. The labourer's productive consumption,
and his individual consumption, are therefore totally distinct. In the former, he
acts as the motive power of capital, and belongs to the capitalist. In the latter,
he belongs to himself, and performs his necessary vital functions outside the process
of production. The result of the one is, that the capitalist lives; of the other,
that the labourer lives.

When treating of the working-day, we saw that the labourer is often compelled to make
his individual consumption a mere incident of production. In such a case, he supplies
himself with necessaries in order to maintain his labour-power, just as coal and water
are supplied to the steam-engine and oil to the wheel. His means of consumption, in
that case, are the mere means of consumption required by a means of production; his
individual consumption is directly productive consumption. This, however, appears
to be an abuse not essentially appertaining to capitalist production. [8]

The matter takes quite another aspect, when we contemplate, not the single capitalist,
and the single labourer, but the capitalist class and the labouring class, not an
isolated process of production, but capitalist production in full swing, and on its
actual social scale. By converting part of his capital into labour-power, the capitalist
augments the value of his entire capital. He kills two birds with one stone. He profits,
not only by what he receives from but by what be gives to, the labourer. The capital
given in exchange for labour-power is converted into necessaries, by the consumption
of which the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing labourers are reproduced,
and new labourers are begotten. Within the limits of what is strictly necessary, the
individual consumption of the working-class is, therefore, the reconversion of the
means of subsistence given by capital in exchange for labour-power, into fresh labour-power
at the disposal of capital for exploitation. It is the production and reproduction
of that means of production so indispensable to the capitalist: the labourer himself.
The individual consumption of the labourer, whether it proceed within the workshop
or outside it, whether it be part of the process of production or not, forms therefore
a factor of the production and reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery
does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing. The
fact that the labourer consumes his means of subsistence for his own purposes, and
not to please the capitalist, has no bearing on the matter. The consumption of food
by a beast of burden is none the less a necessary factor in the process of production,
because the beast enjoys what it eats. The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class
is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the
capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer's instincts of self-preservation
and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer's individual
consumption as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from
imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take the more
substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food. [9]

Hence both the capitalist and his ideological representative, the political economist,
consider that part alone of the labourer's individual consumption to be productive,
which is requisite for the perpetuation of the class, and which therefore must take
place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume; what the labourer
consumes for his own pleasure beyond that part, is unproductive consumption. [10] If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the
labourer's consumption, unaccompanied by increase in the consumption of labour-power
by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively. [11] In reality, the individual consumption of the labourer is unproductive as regards
himself, for it reproduces nothing but the needy individual; it is productive to the
capitalist and to the State, since it is the production of the power that creates
their wealth. [12]

From a social point of view, therefore, the working-class, even when not directly
engaged in the labour-process, is just as much an appendage of capital as the ordinary
instruments of labour. Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits,
a mere factor in the process of production. That process, however, takes good care
to prevent these self-conscious instruments from leaving it in the lurch, for it removes
their product, as fast as it is made, from their pole to the opposite pole of capital.
Individual consumption provides, on the one hand, the means for their maintenance
and reproduction: on the other hand, it secures by the annihilation of the necessaries
of life, the continued re-appearance of the workman in the labour-market. The Roman
slave was held by fetters: the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.
The appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of employers,
and by the fictio juris of a contract.

In former times, capital resorted to legislation, whenever necessary, to enforce its
proprietary rights over the free labourer. For instance, down to 1815, the emigration
of mechanics employed in machine making was, in England, forbidden, under grievous
pains and penalties.

The reproduction of the working-class carries with it the accumulation of skill, that
is handed down from one generation to another. [13] To what extent the capitalist reckons the existence of such a skilled class among
the factors of production that belong to him by right, and to what extent he actually
regards it as the reality of his variable capital, is seen so soon as a crisis threatens
him with its loss. In consequence of the civil war in the United States and of the
accompanying cotton famine, the majority of the cotton operatives in Lancashire were,
as is well known, thrown out of work. Both from the working-class itself, and from
other ranks of society, there arose a cry for State aid, or for voluntary national
subscriptions, in order to enable the "superfluous" hands to emigrate to the colonies
or to the United States. Thereupon, The Times published on the 24th March, 1863, a letter from Edmund Potter, a former president
of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. This letter was rightly called in the House
of Commons, the manufacturers' manifesto. [14] We cull here a few characteristic passages, in which the proprietary rights of capital
over labour-power are unblushingly asserted.

"He" (the man out of work) "may be told the supply of cotton-workers is too large
... and ... must ... in fact be reduced by a third, perhaps, and that then there will
be a healthy demand for the remaining two-thirds.... Public opinion... urges emigration....
The master cannot willingly see his labour supply being removed; he may think, and
perhaps justly, that it is both wrong and unsound.... But if the public funds are
to be devoted to assist emigration, he bas a right to be heard, and perhaps to protest."
Mr. Potter then shows how useful the cotton trade is, how the "trade has undoubtedly
drawn the surplus-population from Ireland and from the agricultural districts," how
immense is its extent, how in the year 1860 it yielded 5/13 ths of the total English
exports, how, after a few years, it will again expand by the extension of the market,
particularly of the Indian market, and by calling forth a plentiful supply of cotton
at 6d. per lb. He then continues: "Some time ...,one, two, or three years, it may
be, will produce the quantity.... The question I would put then is this — Is the trade worth retaining? Is it worth
while to keep the machinery (he means the living labour machines) in order, and is
it not the greatest folly to think of parting with that? I think it is. I allow that
the workers are not a property, not the property of Lancashire and the masters; but
they are the strength of both; they are the mental and trained power which cannot
be. replaced for a generation; the mere machinery which they work might much of it
be beneficially replaced, nay improved, in a twelvemonth [15] Encourage or allow (!) the working-power to emigrate, and what of the capitalist?...
Take away the cream of the workers, and fixed capital will depreciate in a great degree,
and the floating will not subject itself to a struggle with the short supply of inferior
labour.... We are told the workers wish it" (emigration). "Very natural it is that
they should do so.... Reduce, compress the cotton trade by taking away its working
power and reducing their wages expenditure, say one-fifth, or five millions, and what
then would happen to the class above, the small shopkeepers; and what of the rents,
the cottage rents.... Trace out the effects upwards to the small farmer, the better
householder, and ... the landowner, and say if there could be any suggestion more
suicidal to all classes of the country than by enfeebling a nation by exporting the
best of its manufacturing population, and destroying the value of some of its most
productive capital and enrichment .... I advise a loan (of five or six millions sterling),
... extending it may be over two or three years, administered by special commissioners
added to the Boards of Guardians in the cotton districts, under special legislative
regulations, enforcing some occupation or labour, as a means of keeping up at least
the moral standard of the recipients of the loan... can anything be worse for landowners
or masters than parting with the best of the workers, and demoralising and disappointing
the rest by an extended depletive emigration, a depletion of capital and value in
an entire province?"

Potter, the chosen mouthpiece of the manufacturers, distinguishes two sorts of "machinery,"
each of which belongs to the capitalist, and of which one stands in his factory, the
other at night-time and on Sundays is housed outside the factory, in cottages. The
one is inanimate, the other living. The inanimate machinery not only wears out and
depreciates from day to day, but a great part of it becomes so quickly superannuated,
by constant technical progress, that it can be replaced with advantage by new machinery
after a few months. The living machinery, on the contrary gets better the longer it
lasts, and in proportion as the skill, handed from one generation to another, accumulates.
The Times answered the cotton lord as follows:

"Mr. Edmund Potter is so impressed with the exceptional and supreme importance of
the cotton masters that, in order to preserve this class and perpetuate their profession,
he would keep half a million of the labouring class confined in a great moral workhouse
against their' will. 'Is the trade worth retaining?' asks Mr. Potter. 'Certainly by
all honest means it is,' we answer. 'Is it worth while keeping the machinery in order?'
again asks Mr. Potter. Here we hesitate. By the 'machinery' Mr. Potter means the human
machinery, for he goes on to protest that he does not mean to use them as an absolute
property. We must confess that we do not think it 'worth while,' or even possible,
to keep the human machinery in order-that is to shut it up and keep it oiled till
it is wanted. Human machinery will rust under inaction, oil and rub it as you may. Moreover, the human machinery will, as we have just seen,
get the steam up of its own accord, and burst or run amuck in our great towns. it
might, as Mr. Potter says, require some time to reproduce the workers, but, having
machinists and capitalists at hand, we could always find thrifty, hard, industrious
men wherewith to improvise more master-manufacturers than we can ever want. Mr. Potter
talks of the trade reviving 'in one, two, or three years,' and he asks us not 'to
encourage or allow (!) the working power to emigrate.' [16] He says that it is very natural the workers should wish to emigrate; but he thinks
that in spite of their desire, the nation ought to keep this half million of workers
with their 700,000 dependents, shut up in the cotton districts; and as a necessary
consequence, he must of course think that the nation ought to keep down their discontent
by force, and sustain them by alms — and upon the chance that the cotton masters may
some day want them.... The time is come when the great public opinion of these islands
must operate to save this 'working power' from those who would deal with it as they
would deal with iron, and coal, and cotton."

The Times' article was only a jeu d'esprit. The "great public opinion" was, in fact, of Mr.
Potter's opinion, that the factory operatives are part of the movable fittings of
a factory. Their emigration was prevented. They were locked up in that "moral workhouse,"
the cotton districts, and they form, as before, "the strength" of the cotton manufacturers
of Lancashire.

Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power
and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting
the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live,
and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.
[17] It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and labourer confront each other
in the market as buyer and seller. It is the process itself that incessantly hurls
back the labourer on to the market as a vendor of his labour-power, and that incessantly
converts his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him. In reality,
the labourer belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital. His economic
bondage [18] is both brought about and concealed by the periodic sale of himself, by his change
of masters, and by the oscillations in the market-price of labour-power. [19]

Capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process,
of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value,
but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist,
on the other the wage-labourer. [20]

[2] "Wages as well as profits are to be considered, each of them, as really a portion
of the finished product." (Ramsay, l. c., p. 142.) "The share of the product which
comes to the labourer in the form of wages." (J. Mill, "Eléments, &c." Translated
by Parissot. Paris, 1823, p. 34.)

[3] "When capital is employed in advancing to the workman his wages, it adds nothing
to the funds for the maintenance of labour." (Cazenove in note to his edition of Malthus'
"Definitions in Pol. Econ." London, 1853, p. 22.)

[4] "The wages of labour are advanced by capitalists in the case of less than one fourth
of the labourers of the earth." (Rich. Jones: "Textbook of Lectures on the Pol. Econ.
of Nations." Hertford, 1852, p. 36.)

[5] "Though the manufacturer" (i.e., the labourer) "has his wages advanced to him by
his master, he in reality costs him no expense, the value of these wages being generally
reserved, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which
his labour is bestowed." (A. Smith, l. c., Book II.. ch. III, p. 311.)

[6] "This is a remarkably peculiar property of productive labour. Whatever is productively
consumed is capital and it becomes capital by consumption." (James Mill, l. c., p.
242.) James Mill, however, never got on the track of this "remarkably peculiar property."

[7] "It is true indeed, that the first introducing a manufacture employs many poor, but
they cease not to be so, and the continuance of it makes many." ("Reasons for a Limited
Exportation of Wool." London, 1677, p. 19.) "The farmer now absurdly asserts, that
he keeps the poor. They are indeed kept in misery." ("Reasons for the Late Increase
of the Poor Rates: or a Comparative View of the Prices of labour and Provisions."
London, 1777, p. 31.)

[8] Rossi would not declaim so emphatically against this, had lie really penetrated the
secret of "productive consumption."

[9] "The labourers in the mines of S. America, whose daily task (the heaviest perhaps
in the world) consists in bringing to the surface on their shoulders a load of metal
weighing from 180 to 200 pounds, from a depth of 450 feet, live on broad and beans
only; they themselves would prefer the bread alone for food, but their masters, who
have found out that the men cannot work so hard on bread, treat them like horses,
and compel them to eat beans; beans, however, are relatively much richer in bone-earth
(phosphate of lime) than is bread." (Liebig, l. c., vol. 1., p. 194, note.)

[11] "If the price of labour should rise so high that, notwithstanding the increase of
capital, no more could be employed, I should say that such increase of capital would
be still unproductively consumed." (Ricardo, l. c., p. 163.)

[12] "The only productive consumption, properly so called, is the consumption or destruction
of wealth" (he alludes to the means of production) "by capitalists with a view to
reproduction.... The workman ... is a productive consumer to the person who employs
him, and to the State, but not, strictly speaking, to himself." (Malthus' "Definitions,
&c.", p. 30.)

[13] "The only thing, of which one can say, that it is stored up and prepared beforehand,
is the skill of the labourer.... The accumulation and storage of skilled labour, that
most important operation, is, as regards the great mass of labourers, accomplished
without any capital whatever." (Th. Hodgskin: "Labour Defended, &c.," p. 13.)

[14] "That letter might be looked upon as the manifesto of the manufacturers." (Ferrand:
"Motion on the Cotton Famine." H.o.C., 27th April, 1863.)

[15] It will not be forgotten that this same capital sings quite another song, under ordinary
circumstances, when there is a question of reducing wages. Then the masters exclaim
with one voice: "The factory operatives should keep in wholesome remembrance the fact
that theirs is really a low species of skilled labour, and that there is none which
is more easily acquired, or of its quality more amply remunerated, or which, by a
short training of the least expert, can be more quickly, as well as abundantly, acquired
... The master's machinery" (which we now learn can be replaced with advantage in
12 months,) "really plays a far more important part in the business of production
than the labour and skill of the operative" (who cannot now be replaced under 30 years),
"which six months' education can reach, and a common labourer can learn." (See ante,
p. 423.)

[16] Parliament did not vote a single farthing in aid of emigration, but simply passed
some Acts empowering the municipal corporations to keep the operatives in a half-starved
state, i.e., to exploit them at less than the normal wages. On the other hand, when 3 years
later, the cattle disease broke out, Parliament broke wildly through its usages and
voted, straight off, millions for indemnifying the millionaire landlords, whose farmers
in any event came off without loss, owing to the rise in the price of meat. The bull-like
bellow of the landed proprietors at the opening of Parliament, in 1866, showed that
a man can worship the cow Sabala without being a Hindu, and can change himself into
an ox without being a Jupiter.

[18] A boorishly clumsy form of this bondage exists in the county of Durham. This Is one
of the few counties, in which circumstances do not secure to the farmer undisputed
proprietary rights over the agricultural labourer. The mining industry allows the
latter some choice. In this county, the farmer, contrary to the custom elsewhere,
rents only such farms as have on them labourers' cottages. The rent of the cottage
is a part of the wages. These cottages are known as "hinds' houses." They are let
to the labourers in consideration of certain feudal services, under a contract called
"bondage," which, amongst other things, binds the labourer, during the time he is
employed elsewhere, to leave some one, say his daughter, &c., to supply his place.
The labourer himself is called a "bondsman." The relationship here set up also shows
how individual consumption by the labourer becomes consumption on behalf of capital-or
productive consumption-from quite a new point of view: "It is curious to observe that
the very dung of the hind and bondsman is the perquisite of the calculating lord ...
and the lord will allow no privy but his own to exist in the neighbourhood, and will
rather give a bit of manure here and there for a garden than bate any part of his
seigneurial right." ("Public Health, Report VII., 1864," p. 188.)

[19] It will not be forgotten, that, with respect to the labour of children, &c., even
the formality of a voluntary sale disappears.

[20] "Capital pre-supposes wage-labour, and wage-labour pre-supposes capital. One is a
necessary condition to the existence of the other; they mutually call each other into
existence. Does an operative in a cotton-factory produce nothing but cotton goods?
No, he produces capital. He produces values that give fresh command over his labour,
and that, by means of such command, create fresh values." (Karl Marx: "Lohnarbeit
und Kapital," in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: No. 266, 7th April, 1849.) The articles published under the above title in the N. Rh. Z. are parts of some lectures given by me on that subject, in 1847, in the German "Arheiter-Verein"
at Brussels, the publication of which was interrupted by the revolution of February.

SECTION 1. CAPITALIST PRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY INCREASING SCALE. TRANSITION OF
THE LAWS OF PROPERTY THAT CHARACTERISE PRODUCTION OF COMMODITIES INTO LAWS OF CAPITALIST
APPROPRIATION

Hitherto we have investigated how surplus-value emanates from capital; we have now
to see how capital arises from surplus-value. Employing surplus-value as capital,
reconverting it into capital, is called accumulation of capital. [1]

First let us consider this transaction from the standpoint of the individual capitalist.
Suppose a spinner to have advanced a capital of £10,000, of which four-fifths (£8,000)
are laid out in cotton, machinery, &c., and one-fifth (£2,000) in wages. Let him produce
240,000 lbs. of yam annually, having a value of £2,000. The rate of surplus-value
being 100%, the surplus-value lies in the surplus or net product of 40,000 lbs. of
yarn, one-sixth of the gross product, with a value of £2,000 which will be realised
by a sale. £2,000 is £2,000. We can neither see nor smell in this sum of money a trace
of surplus-value. When we know that a given value is surplus-value, we know how its
owner came by it; but that does not alter the nature either of value or of money.

In order to convert this additional sum of £2,000 into capital, the master-spinner
will, all circumstances remaining as before, advance four-fifths of it (£1,600) in
the purchase of cotton, &c., and one-fifth (£400) in the purchase of additional spinners,
who will find in the market the necessaries of life whose value the master has advanced
to them.

Then the new capital of £2,000 functions in the spinning-mill, and brings in, in its
turn, a surplus-value of £400.

The capital-value was originally advanced in the money-form. The surplus-value on
the contrary is, originally, the value of a definite portion of the gross product.
If this gross product be sold, converted into money, the capital-value regains its
original form. From this moment the capital-value and the surplus-value are both of
them sums of money, and their reconversion into capital takes place in precisely the
same way. The one, as well as the other, is laid out by the capitalist in the purchase
of commodities that place him in a position to begin afresh the fabrication of his
goods, and this time, on an extended scale. But in order to be able to buy those commodities,
he must find them ready in the market.

His own yams circulate, only because he brings his annual product to market, as all
other capitalists likewise do with their commodities. But these commodities, before
coming to market, were part of the general annual product, part of the total mass
of objects of every kind, into which the sum of the individual capitals, i.e., the total capital of society, had been converted in the course of the year, and
of which each capitalist had in hand only an aliquot part. The transactions in the
market effectuate only the interchange of the individual components of this annual
product, transfer them from one hand to another, but can neither augment the total
annual production, nor alter the nature of the objects produced. Hence the use that
can be made of the total annual product, depends entirely upon its own composition,
but in no way upon circulation.

The annual production, must in the first place furnish all those objects (use-values)
from which the material components of capital, used up in the course of the year,
have to be replaced. Deducting these there remains the net or surplus-product, in
which the surplus-value lies. And of what does this surplus-product consist? Only
of things destined to satisfy the wants and desires of the capitalist class, things
which, consequently, enter into the consumption-fund of the capitalists? Were that
the case, the cup of surplus-value would be drained to the very dregs, and nothing
but simple reproduction would ever take place.

To accumulate it is necessary to convert a portion of the surplus-product into capital.
But we cannot, except by a miracle, convert into capital anything but such articles
as can be employed in the labour-process (i.e., means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance
of the labourer (i.e., means of subsistence). Consequently, a part of the annual surplus-labour must have
been applied to the production of additional means of production and subsistence,
over and above the quantity of these things required to replace the capital advanced.
In one word, surplus-value is convertible into capital solely because the surplus-product,
whose value it is, already comprises the material elements of new capital. [2]

Now in order to allow of these elements actually functioning as capital, the capitalist
class requires additional labour. If the exploitation of the labourers already employed
do not increase, either extensively or intensively, then additional labour-power must
be found. For this the mechanism of capitalist production provides beforehand, by
converting the working-class into a class dependent on wages, a class whose ordinary
wages suffice, not only for its maintenance, but for its increase. it is only necessary
for capital to incorporate this additional labour-power, annually supplied by the
working-class in the shape of labourers of all ages, with the surplus means of production
comprised in the annual produce, and the conversion of surplus-value into capital
is complete. From a concrete point of view, accumulation resolves itself into the
reproduction of capital on a progressively increasing scale. The circle in which simple
reproduction moves, alters its form, and, to use Sismondi's expression, changes into
a spiral. [3]

Let us now return to our illustration. It is the old story: Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac
begat Jacob, and so on. The original capital of £10,000 brings in a surplus-value
of £2,000, which is capitalised. The new capital of £2,000 brings in a surplus-value
of £400, and this, too, is capitalised, converted into a second additional capital,
which, in its turn, produces a further surplus-value of £80. And so the ball rolls
on.

We here leave out of consideration the portion of the surplus-value consumed by the
capitalist. Just as little does it concern us, for the moment, whether the additional
capital is joined on to the original capital, or is separated from it to function
independently; whether the same capitalist, who accumulated it, employs it, or whether
he hands it over to another. This only we must not forget, that by the side of the
newly-formed capital, the original capital continues to reproduce itself, and to produce
surplus-value, and that this is also true of all accumulated capital, and the additional
capital engendered by it.

The original capital was formed by the advance of £10,000. How did the owner become
possessed of it? "By his own labour and that of his forefathers," answer unanimously
the spokesmen of Political Economy. [4] And, in fact, their supposition appears the only one consonant with the laws of the
production of commodities.

But it is quite otherwise with regard to the additional capital of £2,000. How that
originated we know perfectly well. There is not one single atom of its value that
does not owe its existence to unpaid labour. The means of production, with which the
additional labour-power is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the
labourers are sustained, are nothing but component parts of the surplus-product, of
the tribute annually exacted from the working-class by the capitalist class. Though
the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labour-power even
at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction
is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the
conquered with the money he has robbed them of.

If the additional capital employs the person who produced it, this producer must not
only continue to augment the value of the original capital, but must buy back the
fruits of his previous labour with more labour than they cost. When viewed as a transaction
between the capitalist class and the working-class, it makes no difference that additional
labourers are employed by means of the unpaid labour of the previously employed labourers.
The capitalist may even convert the additional capital into a machine that throws
the producers of that capital out of work, and that replaces them by a few children.
In every case the working-class creates by the surplus-labour of one year the capital
destined to employ additional labour in the following year. [5] And this is what is called: creating capital out of capital.

The accumulation of the first additional capital of £2,000 pre-supposes a value of
£10,000 belonging to the capitalist by virtue of his "primitive labour," and advanced
by him. The second additional capital of £400 pre-supposes, on the contrary, only
the previous accumulation of the £2,000, of which the £400 is the surplus-value capitalised.
The ownership of past unpaid labour is thenceforth the sole condition for the appropriation
of living unpaid labour on a constantly increasing scale. The more the capitalist
has accumulated, the more is he able to accumulate.

In so far as the surplus-value, of which the additional capital, No. 1, consists,
is the result of the purchase of labour-power with part of the original capital, a
purchase that conformed to the laws of the exchange of commodities, and that, from
a legal standpoint, pre-supposes nothing beyond the free disposal, on the part of
the labourer, of his own capacities, and on the part of the owner of money or commodities,
of the values that belong to him; in so far as the additional capital, No. 2, &c.,
is the mere result of No. 1, and, therefore, a consequence of the above conditions;
in so far as each single transaction invariably conforms to the laws of the exchange
of commodities, the capitalist buying labour-power, the labourer selling it, and we
will assume at its real value; in so far as all this is true, it is evident that the
laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production
and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic
changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation
with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only
an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is
exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of the product of others' labour
appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only
be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation
of exchange subsisting between capitalist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining
to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction,
and only mystifying it. The ever repeated purchase and sale of labour-power is now
the mere form; what really takes place is this — the capitalist again and again appropriates,
without equivalent, a portion of the previously materialised labour of others, and
exchanges it for a greater quantity of living labour. At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man's own labour. At
least, some such assumption was necessary since only commodity-owners with equal rights
confronted each other, and the sole means by which a man could become possessed of
the commodities of others, was by alienating his own commodities; and these could
be replaced by labour alone. Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on
the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product,
and to be the impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own
product. The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence
of a law that apparently originated in their identity. [6]

Therefore, [7] however much the capitalist mode of appropriation may seem to fly in the face of
the original laws of commodity production, it nevertheless arises, not from a violation,
but, on the contrary, from the application of these laws. Let us make this clear once
more by briefly reviewing the consecutive phases of motion whose culminating point
is capitalist accumulation.

We saw, in the first place, that the original conversion of a sum of values into capital
was achieved in complete accordance with the laws of exchange. One party to the contract
sells his labour-power, the other buys it. The former receives the value of his commodity,
whose use-value — labour — is thereby alienated to the buyer. Means of production
which already belong to the latter are then transformed by him, with the aid of labour
equally belonging to him, into a new product which is likewise lawfully his.

The value of this product includes: first, the value of the used-up means of production.
Useful labour cannot consume these means of production without transferring their
value to the new product, but, to be saleable, labour-power must be capable of supplying
useful labour in the branch of industry in which it is to be employed.

The value of the new product further includes: the equivalent of the value of the
labour-power together with a surplus-value. This is so because the value of the labour-power
— sold for a definite length of time, say a day, a week, etc. — is less than the value
created by its use during that time. But the worker has received payment for the exchange-value
of his labour-power and by so doing has alienated its use-value — this being the case
in every sale and purchase.

The fact that this particular commodity, labour-power, possesses the peculiar use-value
of supplying labour, and therefore of creating value, cannot affect the general law
of commodity production. If, therefore, the magnitude of value advanced in wages is
not merely found again in the product, but is found there augmented by a surplus-value,
this is not because the seller has been defrauded, for he has really received the
value of his commodity; it is due solely to the fact that this commodity has been
used up by the buyer.

The law of exchange requires equality only between the exchange-values of the commodities
given in exchange for one another. From the very outset it pre-supposes even a difference
between their use-values and it has nothing whatever to do with their consumption,
which only begins after the deal is closed and executed.

Thus the original conversion of money into capital is achieved in the most exact accordance
with the economic laws of commodity production and with the right of property derived
from them. Nevertheless, its result is:

(1) that the product belongs to the capitalist and not to the worker;

(2) that the value of this product includes, besides the value of the capital advanced,
a surplus-value which costs the worker labour but the capitalist nothing, and which
none the less becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist;

(3) that the worker has retained his labour-power and can sell it anew if he can find
a buyer.

Simple reproduction is only the periodical repetition of this first operation; each
time money is converted afresh into capital. Thus the law is not broken; on the contrary,
it is merely enabled to operate continuously. "Several successive acts of exchange
have only made the last represent the first" (Sismondi, "Nouveaux Principes, etc.,"
p. 70).

And yet we have seen that simple reproduction suffices to stamp this first operation,
in so far as it is conceived as an isolated process, with a totally changed character.
"Of those who share the national income among themselves, the one side (the workers)
acquire every year a fresh right to their share by fresh work; the others (the capitalists)
have already acquired, by work done originally, a permanent right to their share"
(Sismondi, l. c., pp. 110, 111). It is indeed notorious that the sphere of labour
is not the only one in which primogeniture works miracles.

Nor does it matter if simple reproduction is replaced by reproduction on an extended
scale, by accumulation. In the former case the capitalist squanders the whole surplus-value
in dissipation, in the latter he demonstrates his bourgeois virtue by consuming only
a portion of it and converting the rest into money.

The surplus-value is his property; it, has never belonged to anyone else. If he advances
it for the purposes of production, the advances made come from his own funds, exactly
as on the day when he first entered the market. The fact that on this occasion the
funds are derived from the unpaid labour of his workers makes absolutely no difference.
If worker B is paid out of the surplus-value which worker A produced, then, in the
first place, A furnished that surplus-value without having the just price of his commodity
cut by a half-penny, and, in the second place, the transaction is no concern of B's
whatever. What B claims, and has a right to claim, is that the capitalist should pay
him the value of his labour-power. "Both were still gainers: the worker because he
was advanced the fruits of his labour" (should read: of the unpaid labour of other
workers) "before the work was done" (should read: before his own labour had borne
fruit); "the employer (le maître), because the labour of this worker was worth more than his wages" (should read: produced
more value than the value of his wages). (Sismondi, l. c., p. 135.)

To be sure, the matter looks quite different if we consider capitalist production
in the uninterrupted flow of its renewal, and if, in place of the individual capitalist
and the individual worker, we view in their totality, the capitalist class and the
working-class confronting each other. But in so doing we should be applying standards
entirely foreign to commodity production.

Only buyer and seller, mutually independent, face each other in commodity production.
The relations between them cease on the day when the term stipulated in the contract
they concluded expires. If the transaction is repeated, it is repeated as the -result
of a new agreement which has nothing to do with the previous one and which only by
chance brings the same seller together again with the same buyer.

If, therefore, commodity production, or one of its associated processes, is to be
judged according to its own economic laws, we must consider each act of exchange by
itself, apart from any connexion with the act of exchange preceding it and that following
it. And since sales and purchases are negotiated solely between particular individuals,
it is not admissible to seek here for relations between whole social classes.

However long a series of periodical reproductions and preceding accumulations the
capital functioning to-day may have passed through, it always preserves its original
virginity. So long as the laws of exchange are observed in every single act of exchange
the mode of appropriation can be completely revolutionised without in any way affecting
the property rights which correspond to commodity production. These same rights remain
in force both at the outset, when the product belongs to its producer, who, exchanging
equivalent for equivalent, can enrich himself only by his own labour, and also in
the period of capitalism, when social wealth becomes to an ever-increasing degree
the property of those who are in a position to appropriate continually and ever afresh
the unpaid labour of others.

This result becomes inevitable from the moment there is a free sale, by the labourer
himself, of labour-power as a commodity. But it is also only from then onwards that
commodity production is generalised and becomes the typical form of production; it
is only from then onwards that, from the first, every product is produced for sale
and all wealth produced goes through the sphere of circulation. Only when and where
wage-labour is its basis does commodity production impose itself upon society as a
whole; but only then and there also does it unfold all its hidden potentialities.
To say that the supervention of wage-labour adulterates commodity production is to
say that commodity production must not develop if it is to remain unadulterated. To
the extent that commodity production, in accordance with its own inherent laws, develops
further, into capitalist production, the property laws of commodity production change
into the laws of capitalist appropriation. [8]

We have seen that even in the case of simple reproduction, all capital, whatever its
original source, becomes converted into accumulated capital, capitalised surplus-value.
But in the flood of production all the capital originally advanced becomes a vanishing
quantity (magnitudo evanescens, in the mathematical sense), compared with the directly accumulated capital, i.e., with the surplus-value or surplus-product that is reconverted into capital, whether
it functions in the hands of its accumulator, or in those of others. Hence, Political
Economy describes capital in general as "accumulated wealth" (converted surplus-value
or revenue), "that is employed over again in the production of surplus-value," [9] and the capitalist as "the owner of surplus-value." [10] It is merely another way of expressing the same thing to say that all existing capital
is accumulated or capitalised interest, for interest is a mere fragment of surplus-value.
[11]

SECTION 2. ERRONEOUS CONCEPTION, BY POLITICAL ECONOMY, OF REPRODUCTION ON A PROGRESSIVELY
INCREASING SCALE

Before we further investigate accumulation or the reconversion of surplus-value into
capital, we must brush on one side an ambiguity introduced by the classical economists.

Just as little as the commodities that the capitalist buys with a part of the surplus-value
for his own consumption, serve the purpose of production and of creation of value,
so little is the labour that he buys for the satisfaction of his natural and social
requirements, productive labour. Instead of converting surplus-value into capital,
he, on the contrary, by the purchase of those commodities and that labour, consumes
or expends it as revenue. In the face of the habitual mode of life of the old feudal
nobility, which, as Hegel rightly says, "consists in consuming what is in hand," and
more especially displays itself in the luxury of personal retainers, it was extremely important for bourgeois economy to promulgate the doctrine that accumulation
of capital is the first duty of every citizen, and to preach without ceasing, that
a man cannot accumulate, if he eats up all his revenue, instead of spending a good
part of it in the acquisition of additional productive labourers, who bring in more
than they cost. On the other hand the economists had to contend against the popular
prejudice, that confuses capitalist production with hoarding, [12]and fancies that accumulated wealth is either wealth that is rescued from being destroyed
in its existing form, i.e., from being consumed, or wealth that is withdrawn from circulation. Exclusion of
money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital,
while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery.
[13] The accumulation of commodities in great masses is the result either of over-production
or of a stoppage of circulation. [14] It is true that the popular mind is impressed by the sight, on the one hand, of the
mass of goods that are stored up for gradual consumption by the rich, [15] and on the other hand, by the formation of reserve stocks; the latter, a phenomenon
that is common to all modes of production, and on which we shall dwell for a moment,
when we come to analyse circulation. Classical economy is therefore quite right, when
it maintains that the consumption of surplus-products by productive, instead of by
unproductive labourers, is a characteristic feature of the process of accumulation.
But at this point the mistakes also begin. Adam Smith has made it the fashion, to
represent accumulation as nothing more than consumption of surplus-products by productive
labourers, which amounts to saying, that the capitalising of surplus-value consists in merely turning surplus-value into labour-power.
Let us see what Ricardo, e.g., says: "It must be understood that all the productions of a country are consumed;
but it makes the greatest difference imaginable whether they are consumed by those
who reproduce, or by those who do not reproduce another value. When we say that revenue
is saved, and added to capital, what we mean is, that the portion of revenue, so said
to be added to capital, is consumed by productive instead of unproductive labourers.
There can be no greater error than in supposing that capital is increased by non-consumption."
[16] There can be no greater error than that which Ricardo and all subsequent economists
repeat after A. Smith, viz., that "the part of revenue, of which it is said, it has
been added to capital, is consumed by productive labourers." According to this, all
surplus-value that is changed into capital becomes variable capital. So far from this
being the case, the surplus-value, like the original capital, divides itself into
constant capital and variable capital, into means of production and labour-power.
labour-power is the form under which variable capital exists during the process of
production. In this process the labour-power is itself consumed by the capitalist
while the means of production are consumed by the labour-power in the exercise of
its function, labour. At the same time, the money paid for the purchase of the labour-power,
is converted into necessaries, that are consumed, not by "productive labour," but
by the "productive labourer." Adam Smith, by a fundamentally perverted analysis, arrives
at the absurd conclusion, that even though each individual capital is divided into
a constant and a variable part, the capital of society resolves itself only into variable
capital, i.e, is laid out exclusively in payment of wages. For instance, suppose a cloth manufacturer
converts £2,000 into capital. One portion he lays out in buying weavers, the other
in woollen yam, machinery, &c. But the people, from whom he buys the yarn and the
machinery, pay for labour with a part of the purchase money, and so on until the whole
£2,000 are spent in the payment of wages, i.e, until the entire product represented by the £2,000 has been consumed by productive
labourers. It is evident that the whole gist of this argument lies in the words "and
so on," which send us from pillar to post. In truth, Adam Smith breaks his investigation
off, just where its difficulties begin. [17]

The annual process of reproduction is easily understood, so long as we keep in view
merely the sum total of the year's production. But every single component of this
product must be brought into the market as a commodity, and there the difficulty begins.
The movements of the individual capitals, and of the personal revenues, cross and
intermingle and are lost in the general change of places, in the circulation of the
wealth of society; this dazes the sight, and propounds very complicated problems for
solution. In the third part of Book II. I shall give the analysis of the real bearings
of the facts. It is one of the great merits of the Physiocrats, that in their Tableau économique they were the first to attempt to depict the annual production in the shape in which
it is presented to us after passing through the process of circulation. [18]

For the rest, it is a matter of course, that Political Economy, acting in the interests
of the capitalist class, has not failed to exploit the doctrine of Adam. Smith, viz.,
that the whole of that part of the surplus-product which is converted into capital,
is consumed by the working-class.

SECTION 3. SEPARATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE. THE ABSTINENCE THEORY

In the last preceding chapter, we treated surplus-value (or the surplus-product) solely
as a fund for supplying the individual consumption of the capitalist. In this chapter
we have, so far, treated it solely as a fund for accumulation. It is, however, neither
the one nor the other, but is both together. One portion is consumed by the capitalist
as revenue, [19] the other is employed as capital, is accumulated.

Given the mass of surplus-value, then, the larger the one of these parts, the smaller
is the other. Caeteris paribus, the ratio of these parts determines the magnitude of the accumulation. But it is
by the owner of the surplus-value, by the capitalist alone, that the division is made.
it is his deliberate act. That part of the tribute exacted by him which he accumulates,
is said to be saved by him, because he does not eat it, i.e, because he performs the function of a capitalist, and enriches himself.

Except as personified capital, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right
to that historical existence, which, to use an expression of the witty Lichnowsky,
"hasn't got no date." And so far only is the necessity for his own transitory existence
implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production. But, so
far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them.
but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent
on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for
production's sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society,
and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher
form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual
forms the ruling principle. Only as personified capital is the capitalist respectable.
As such, he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which
in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social
mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels. Moreover, the development of capitalist
production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of the capital
laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws
of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive
laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve
it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.

So far, therefore, as his actions are a mere function of capital — endowed as capital
is, in his person, with consciousness and a will — his own private consumption is
a robbery perpetrated on accumulation, just as in book-keeping by double entry, the
private expenditure of the capitalist is placed on the debtor side of his account
against his capital. To accumulate, is to conquer the world of social wealth, to increase
the mass of human beings exploited by him, and thus to extend both the direct and
the indirect sway of the capitalist. [20]

But original sin is at work everywhere. As capitalist production, accumulation, and
wealth, become developed, the capitalist ceases to be the mere incarnation of capital.
He has a fellow-feeling for his own Adam, and his education gradually enables him
to smile at the rage for asceticism, as a mere prejudice of the old-fashioned miser.
While the capitalist of the classical type brands individual consumption as a sin
against his function, and as "abstinence" from accumulating, the modernised capitalist
is capable of looking upon accumulation as "abstinence" from pleasure.

"Two souls, alas, do dwell with in his breast; The one is ever parting from the other." [21]

At the historical dawn of capitalist production, — and every capitalist upstart has
personally to go through this historical stage — avarice, and desire to get rich,
are the ruling passions. But the progress of capitalist production not only creates
a world of delights; it lays open, in speculation and the credit system, a thousand
sources of sudden enrichment. When a certain stage of development has been reached,
a conventional degree of prodigality, which is also an exhibition of wealth, and consequently
a source of credit, becomes a business necessity to the "unfortunate" capitalist.
Luxury enters into capital's expenses of representation. Moreover, the capitalist
gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted
consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and
enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life's enjoyments. Although, therefore,
the prodigality of the capitalist never possesses the bonâ-fide character of the open-handed
feudal lord's prodigality, but, on the contrary, has always lurking behind it the
most sordid avarice and the most anxious calculation, yet his expenditure grows with
his accumulation, without the one necessarily restricting the other. But along with
this growth, there is at the same time developed in his breast, a Faustian conflict
between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment.

Dr. Aikin says in a work published in 1795: "The trade of Manchester may be divided
into four periods. First, when manufacturers were obliged to work hard for their livelihood."
They enriched themselves chiefly by robbing the parents, whose children were bound
as apprentices to them; the parents paid a high premium, while the apprentices were
starved. On the other hand, the average profits were low, and to accumulate, extreme
parsimony was requisite. They lived like misers and were far from consuming even the
interest on their capital. "The second period, when they had begun to acquire little
fortunes, but worked as hard as before," — for direct exploitation of labour costs
labour, as every slave-driver knows — "and lived in as plain a manner as before....
The third, when luxury began, and the trade was pushed by sending out riders for orders
into every market town in the Kingdom.... It is probable that few or no capitals of
£3,000 to £4,000 acquired by trade existed here before 1690. However, about that time,
or a little later, the traders had got money beforehand, and began to build modem
brick houses, instead of those of wood and plaster." Even in the early part of the
18th century, a Manchester manufacturer, who placed a pint of foreign wine before his guests, exposed
himself to the remarks and headshakings of all his neighbours. Before the rise of
machinery, a manufacturer's evening expenditure at the public house where they all
met, never exceeded sixpence for a glass of punch, and a penny for a screw of tobacco.
It was not till 1758, and this marks an epoch, that a person actually engaged in business
was seen with an equipage of his own. "The fourth period," the last 30 years of the
18th century, "is that in which expense and luxury have made great progress, and was
supported by a trade extended by means of riders and factors through every part of
Europe." [22] What would the good Dr. Aikin say if he could rise from his grave and see the Manchester
of to-day?

Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! "Industry furnishes the material
which saving accumulates." [23] Therefore, save, save, i.e, reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value, or surplus-product into
capital! Accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake: by
this formula classical economy expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie,
and did not for a single instant deceive itself over the birth-throes of wealth. [24] But what avails lamentation in the face of historical necessity? If to classical
economy, the proletarian is but a machine for the production of surplus-value; on
the other hand, the capitalist is in its eyes only a machine for the conversion of
this surplus-value into additional capital. Political Economy takes the historical
function of the capitalist in bitter earnest. In order to charm out of his bosom the
awful conflict between the desire for enjoyment and the chase after riches, Malthus,
about the year 1820, advocated a division of labour, which assigns to the capitalist actually engaged in
production, the business of accumulating, and to the other sharers in surplus-value,
to the landlords, the place-men, the beneficed clergy, &c., the business of spending.
It is of the highest importance, he says, "to keep separate the passion for expenditure
and the passion for accumulation." [25] The capitalists having long been good livers and men of the world, uttered loud cries.
What, exclaimed one of their spokesmen, a disciple of Ricardo, Mr. Malthus preaches
high rents, heavy taxes, &c., so that the pressure of the spur may constantly be kept
on the industrious by unproductive consumers! By all means, production, production
on a constantly increasing scale, runs the shibboleth; but "production will, by such
a process, be far more curbed in than spurred on. Nor is it quite fair thus to maintain
in idleness a number of persons, only to pinch others, who are likely, from their
characters, if you can force them to work, to work with success." [26] Unfair as he finds it to spur on the industrial capitalist, by depriving his bread
of its butter, yet he thinks it necessary to reduce the labourer's wages to a minimum
"to keep him industrious." Nor does he for a moment conceal the fact, that the appropriation
of unpaid labour is the secret of surplus-value. "Increased demand on the part of
the labourers means nothing more than their willingness to take less of their own
product for themselves, and leave a greater part of it to their employers; and if
it be said, that this begets glut, by lessening consumption" (on the part of the labourers),
"I can only reply that glut is synonymous with large profits." [27]

The learned disputation, how the booty pumped out of the labourer may be divided,
with most advantage to accumulation, between the industrial capitalist and the rich
idler, was hushed in face of the revolution of July. Shortly afterwards, the town
proletariat at Lyons sounded the tocsin of revolution, and the country proletariat
in England began to, set fire to farm-yards and corn-stacks. On this side of the Channel
Owenism began to spread; on the other side, St. Simonism and Fourierism. The hour
of vulgar economy had struck. Exactly a year before Nassau W. Senior discovered at
Manchester, that the profit (including interest) of capital is the product of the
last hour of the twelve, he had announced to the world another discovery. "I substitute,"
he proudly says, "for the word capital, considered as an instrument of production,
the word abstinence."' An unparalleled sample this, of the discoveries of vulgar economy! It substitutes
for an economic category, a sycophantic phrase — voilà tout. "When the savage," says Senior, "makes bows, he exercises an industry, but he does
not practise abstinence." [28] This explains how and why, in the earlier states of society, the implements of labour
were fabricated without abstinence on the part of the capitalist. "The more society
progresses, the more abstinence is demanded," [29] namely, from those who ply the industry of appropriating the fruits of others' industry.
All the conditions for carrying on the labour-process are suddenly converted into
so many acts of abstinence on the part of the capitalist. If the corn is not all eaten, but
part of it also sown — abstinence of the capitalist. If the wine gets time to mature
— abstinence of the capitalist. [30] The capitalist robs his own self, whenever he "lends (!) the instruments of production
to the labourer," that is, whenever by incorporating labour-power with them, he uses
them to extract surplus-value out of that Iabour-power, instead of eating them up,
steam-engines, cotton, railways, manure, horses, and all; or as the vulgar economist
childishly puts it, instead of dissipating "their value" in luxuries and other articles
of consumption. [31] How the capitalists as a class are to perform that feat, is a secret that vulgar
economy has hitherto obstinately refused to divulge. Enough, that the world still
jogs on, solely through the self-chastisement of this modern penitent of Vishnu, the
capitalist. Not only accumulation, but the simple "conservation of a capital requires
a constant effort to resist the temptation of consuming it." [32] The simple dictates of humanity therefore plainly enjoin the release of the capitalist
from this martyrdom and temptation, in the same way that the Georgian slave-owner
was lately delivered, by the abolition of slavery, from the painful dilemma, whether
to squander the surplus-product, lashed out of his niggers, entirely in champagne,
or whether to reconvert a part of it into more niggers and more land.

In economic forms of society of the most different kinds, there occurs, not only simple
reproduction, but, in varying degrees, reproduction on a progressively increasing
scale. By degrees more is produced and more consumed, and consequently more products
have to be converted into means of production. This process, however, does not present
itself as accumulation of capital, nor as the function of a capitalist, so long as
the labourer's means of production, and with them, his product and means of subsistence,
do not confront him in the shape of capital. [33] Richard Jones, who died a few years ago, and was the successor of Malthus in the
chair of Political Economy at Haileybury College, discusses this point well in the
light of two important facts. Since the great mass of the Hindu population are peasants
cultivating their land themselves, their products, their instruments of labour and
means of subsistence never take "the shape of a fund saved from revenue, which fund
has, therefore, gone through a previous process of accumulation." [34] On the other hand, the non-agricultural labourers in those provinces where the English
rule has least disturbed the old system, are directly employed by the magnates, to
whom a portion of the agricultural surplus-product is rendered in the shape of tribute
or rent. One portion of this product is consumed by the magnates in kind, another
is converted, for their use, by the labourers, into articles of luxury and such like
things, while the rest forms the wages of the labourers, who own their implements
of labour. Here, production and reproduction on a progressively increasing scale,
go on their way without any intervention from that queer saint, that knight of the
woeful countenance, the capitalist "abstainer."

SECTION 4. CIRCUMSTANCES THAT, INDEPENDENTLY OF THE PROPORTIONAL DIVISION OF SURPLUS-VALUE
INTO CAPITAL AND REVENUE, DETERMINE THE AMOUNT OF ACCUMULATION. DEGREE OF EXPLOITATION
OF LABOUR-POWER. PRODUCTIVITY OF LABOUR. GROWING DIFFERENCE IN AMOUNT BETWEEN CAPITAL
EMPLOYED AND CAPITAL CONSUMED. MAGNITUDE OF CAPITAL ADVANCED

The proportion in which surplus-value breaks up into capital and revenue being given,
the magnitude of the capital accumulated clearly depends on the absolute magnitude
of the surplus-value. Suppose that 80 per cent. were capitalised and 20 per cent.
eaten up, the accumulated capital will be £2,400 or £200, according as the total surplusvalue
has amounted to £3,000 or £500. Hence all the circumstances that determine the mass
of surplus-value, operate to determine the magnitude of the accumulation. We sum them
up once again, but only in so far as they afford new points of view in regard to accumulation.

It will be remembered that the rate of surplus-value depends, in the first place,
on the degree of exploitation of labour-power. Political Economy values this fact
so highly, that it occasionally identifies the acceleration of accumulation due to
increased productiveness of labour, with its acceleration due to increased exploitation
of the labourer. [35] In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly pre-supposed
that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction of
wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not
to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the
labourer's necessary consumption-fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital.

"Wages," says John Stuart Mill, "have no productive power; they are the price of a
productive power. Wages do not contribute, along with labour, to the production of
commodities, no more than the price of tools contributes along with the tools themselves.
If labour could be had without purchase, wages might be dispensed with." [36] But if the labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The
zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach,
although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency
of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards this zero. A writer of the
18th century, often quoted already, the author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce,"
only betrays the innermost secret soul of English capitalism, when he declares the historic mission of England to be the forcing
down of English wages to the level of the French and the Dutch. [37] With other things he says naively: "But if our poor" (technical term for labourers)
"will live luxuriously ... then labour must, of course, be dear.... When it is considered
what luxuries the manufacturing populace consume, such as brandy, gin, tea, sugar,
foreign fruit, strong beer, printed linens, snuff, tobacco, &C." [38] He quotes the work of a Northamptonshire manufacturer, who, with eyes squinting heavenward
moans: "Labour is one-third cheaper in France than in England; for their poor work
hard, and fare hard, as to their food and clothing. Their chief diet is bread, fruit,
herbs, roots, and dried fish; for they very seldom eat flesh; and when wheat is dear,
they eat very little bread." [39] "To which may be added," our essayist goes on, "that their drink is either water or other small liquors, so
that they spend very little money.... These things are very difficult to be brought
about; but they are not impracticable, since they have been effected both in France
and in Holland." [40] Twenty years later, an American humbug, the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford) followed the same line of philanthropy to the great satisfaction of
God and man. His "Essays" are a cookery book with receipts of all kinds for replacing
by some succedaneum the ordinary dear food of the labourer. The following is a particularly
successful receipt of this wonderful philosopher: "5 lbs. of barleymeal, 7 1/2 d.;
5 lbs. of Indian corn, 6 1/4 d.; 3d. worth of red herring, Id. salt, Id. vinegar,
2d. pepper and sweet herbs, in all 20 3/4.; make a soup for 64 men, and at the medium
price of barley and of Indian corn ... this soup may be provided at 1/4 d., the portion
of 20 ounces. [41] With the advance of capitalistic production, the adulteration of food rendered Thompson's
ideal superfluous. [42] At the end of the 18th and during the first ten years of the 19th century, the English
farmers and landlords enforced the absolute minimum of wage, by paying the agricultural
labourers less than the minimum in the form of wages, and the remainder in the shape
of parochial relief. An example of the waggish way in which the English Dogberries acted in their "legal"
fixing of a wages tariff: "The squires of Norfolk had dined, says Mr. Burke, when
they fixed the rate of wages; the squires of Berks evidently thought the labourers
ought not to do so, when they fixed the rate of wages at Speenhamland, 1795.... There
they decide that 'income (weekly) should be 3s. for a man,' when the gallon or half-peck
loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. is at 1s., and increase regularly till bread is 1s. 5d.; when
it is above that sum decrease regularly till it be at 2s., and then his food should be 1/5 th less." [43] Before the Committee of Inquiry of the House of Lords, 1814, a certain A. Bennett,
a large farmer, magistrate, poor-law guardian, and wage-regulator, was asked: "Has
any proportion of the value of daily labour been made up to the labourers out of the
poors' rate?" Answer: "Yes, it has; the weekly income of every family is made up to
the gallon loaf (8 lbs. 11 oz.), and 3d. per head!... The gallon loaf per week is what we suppose sufficient for the maintenance of every
person in the family for the week; and the 3d. is for clothes, and if the parish think
proper to find clothes; the 3d. is deducted. This practice goes through all the western
part of Wiltshire, and, I believe, throughout the country." [44] "For years," exclaims a bourgeois author of that time, "they (the farmers) have degraded
a respectable class of their countrymen, by forcing them to have recourse to the workhouse
... the farmer, while increasing his own gains, has prevented any accumulation on
the part of his labouring dependents." [45] The part played in our days by the direct robbery from the labourer's necessary consumption-fund
in the formation of surplus-value, and, therefore, of the accumulation-fund of capital,
the so-called domestic industry has served to show. (Ch. xv., sect. 8, c.) Further
facts on this subject will be given later.

Although in all branches of industry that part of the constant capital consisting
of instruments of labour must be sufficient for a certain number of labourers (determined
by the magnitude of the undertaking), it by no means always necessarily increases
in the same proportion as the quantity of labour employed. In a factory, suppose that
100 labourers working 8 hours a day yield 800 working-hours. If the capitalist wishes
to raise this sum by one half, he can employ 50 more workers; but then he must also
advance more capital, not merely for wages, but for instruments of labour. But he
might also let the 100 labourers work 12 hours instead of 8, and then the instruments
of labour already to hand would be enough. These would then simply be more rapidly
consumed. Thus additional labour, begotten of the greater tension of labour-power,
can augment surplus-product and surplus-value (i.e., the subject-matter of accumulation),
without corresponding augmentation in the constant part of capital.

In the extractive industries, mines, &c., the raw materials form no part of the capital
advanced. The subject of labour is in this case not a product of previous labour,
but is furnished by Nature gratis, as in the case of metals, minerals, coal, stone,
&c. In these cases the constant capital consists almost exclusively of instruments
of labour, which can very well absorb an increased quantity of labour (day and night
shifts of labourers, e.g.). All other things being equal, the mass and value of the product will rise in direct
proportion to the labour expended. As on the first day of production,. the original
produce-formers, now turned into the creators of the material elements of capital
— man and Nature — still work together. Thanks to the elasticity of labour-power,
the domain of accumulation has extended without any previous enlargement of constant
capital.

In agriculture the land under cultivation cannot be increased without the advance
of more seed and manure. But this advance once made, the purely mechanical working
of the soil itself produces a marvellous effect on the amount of the product. A greater
quantity of labour, done by the same number of labourers as before, thus increases
the fertility, without requiring any new advance in the instruments of labour. It
is once again the direct action of man on Nature which becomes an immediate source
of greater accumulation, without the intervention of any new capital.

Finally, in what is called manufacturing industry, every additional expenditure of
labour pre-supposes a corresponding additional expenditure of raw materials, but not
necessarily of instruments of labour. And as extractive industry and agriculture supply
manufacturing industry with its raw materials and those of its instruments of labour,
the additional product the former have created without additional advance of capital,
tells also in favour of the latter.

General result: by incorporating with itself the two primary creators of wealth, labour-power
and the land, capital acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the
elements of its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own magnitude,
or by the value and the mass of the means of production, already produced, in which
it has its being.

Another important factor in the accumulation of capital is the degree of productivity
of social labour.

With the productive power of labour increases the mass of the products, in which a
certain value, and, therefore, a surplus-value of a given magnitude, is embodied.
The rate of surplus-value remaining the same or even falling, so long as it only falls
more slowly, than the productive power of labour rises, the mass of the surplus-product
increases. The division of this product into revenue and additional capital remaining
the same, the consumption of the capitalist may, therefore, increase without any decrease
in the fund of accumulation. The relative magnitude of the accumulation-fund may even
increase at the expense of the consumption-fund, whilst the cheapening of commodities
places at the disposal of the capitalist as many means of enjoyment as formerly, or
even more than formerly. But hand-in-hand with the increasing productivity of labour,
goes, as we have seen, the cheapening of the labourer, therefore a higher rate of
surplus-value, even when the real wages are rising. The latter never rise proportionally
to the productive power of labour. The same value in variable capital therefore sets
in movement more labour-power, and, therefore, more labour. The same value in constant
capital is embodied in more means of production, i.e., in more instruments of labour, materials of labour and auxiliary materials; it
therefore also supplies more elements for the production both of use-value and of
value, and with these more absorbers of labour. The value of the additional capital,
therefore, remaining the same or even diminishing, accelerated accumulation still
takes place. Not only does the scale of reproduction materially extend, but the production
of surplus-value increases more rapidly than the value of the additional capital.

The development of the productive power of labour reacts also on the original capital
already engaged in the process of production. A part of the functioning constant capital
consists of instruments of labour, such as machinery, &c., which are not consumed,
and therefore not reproduced, or replaced by new ones of the same kind, until after
long periods of time. But every year a part of these instruments of labour -perishes
or reaches t ' he limit of its productive function. It reaches, therefore, in that
year, the time for its periodical reproduction, for its replacement by new ones of
the same kind. If the productiveness of labour has, during the using up of these instruments
of labour, increased (and it develops continually with the uninterrupted advance of
science and technology), more efficient and (considering their increased efficiency),
cheaper machines, tools, apparatus, &c., replace the old. The old capital is reproduced
in a more productive form, apart from the constant detail improvements in the instruments
of labour already in use. The other part of the constant capital, raw material and
auxiliary substances, is constantly reproduced in less than a year; those produced
by agriculture, for the most part annually. Every introduction of improved methods,
therefore, works almost simultaneously on the new capital and on that already in action.
Every advance in Chemistry not only multiplies the number of useful materials and
the useful applications of those already known, thus extending with the growth of
capital its sphere of investment. It teaches at the same time how to throw the -excrements
of the processes of production and consumption back again into the circle of the process
of reproduction, and thus, without any previous outlay of capital, creates new matter
for capital. Like the increased exploitation of natural wealth by the mere increase
in the tension of labour-power, science and technology give capital a power of expansion
independent of the given magnitude of the capital actually functioning. They react
at the same time on that part of the original capital which has entered upon its stage
of renewal. This, in passing into its new shape, incorporates gratis the social advance
made while its old shape was being used up. Of course, this development of productive
power is accompanied by a partial depreciation of functioning capital. So far as this
depreciation makes itself acutely felt in competition, the burden falls on the labourer,
in the increased exploitation of whom the capitalist looks for his indemnification.

Labour transmits to its product the value of the means of production consumed by it.
On the other hand, the value and mass of the means of production set in motion by
a given quantity of labour increase as the labour becomes more productive. Though
the same quantity of labour adds always to its products only the same sum of new value,
still the old capital-value, transmitted by the labour to the products, increases
with the growing productivity of labour.

An English and a Chinese spinner, e.g., may work the same number of hours with the
same intensity; then they will both in a week create equal values. But in spite of
this equality, an immense difference will obtain between the value of the week's product
of the Englishman, who works with a mighty automaton, and that of the Chinaman, who
has but a spinning-wheel. In the same time as the Chinaman spins one pound of cotton,
the Englishman spins several hundreds of pounds. A sum, many hundred times as great,
of old values swells the value of his product, in which those re-appear in a new,
useful form, and can thus function anew as capital. "In 1782," as Frederick Engels
teaches us, "all the wool crop in England of the three preceding years, lay untouched
for want of labourers, and so it must have lain, if newly invented machinery had not
come to its aid and spun it." [46] labour embodied in the form of machinery of course did not directly force into life
a single man, but it made it possible for a smaller number of labourers, with the
addition of relatively less living labour, not only to consume the wool productively, and put into it new value, but to preserve
in the form of yarn, &c., its old value. At the same time, it caused and stimulated
increased reproduction of wool. It is the natural property of living labour, to transmit
old value, whilst it creates new. Hence, with the increase in efficacy, extent and
value of its means of production, consequently with the accumulation that accompanies
the development of its productive power, labour keeps up and eternises an always increasing
capital-value in a form ever new." [47] This natural power of labour takes the appearance of an intrinsic property of capital,
in which it is incorporated, just as the productive forces of social labour take the
appearance of inherent properties of capital, and as the constant appropriation of
surplus-labour by the capitalists, takes that of a constant self-expansion of capital.

With the increase of capital, the difference between the capital employed and the
capital consumed increases. in other words, there is increase in the value and the
material mass of the instruments of labour, such as buildings, machinery, drain-pipes,
working-cattle, apparatus of every kind that function for a longer or shorter time
in processes of production constantly repeated, or that serve for the attainment of
particular useful effects, whilst they themselves only gradually wear out, therefore
only lose their value piecemeal, therefore transfer that value to the product only
bit by bit. In the same proportion as these instruments of labour serve as product-formers
without adding value to the product, i.e., in the same proportion as they are wholly employed but only partly consumed, they
perform, as we saw earlier, the same gratuitous service as the natural forces, water,
steam, air, electricity, etc. This gratuitous service of past labour, when seized
and filled with a soul by living labour, increases with the advancing stages of accumulation.

Since past labour always disguises itself as capital, i.e, since the passive of the labour of A, B, C, etc., takes the form of the active of
the non-labourer X, bourgeois and political economists are full of praises of the
services of dead and gone labour, which, according to the Scotch genius MacCulloch,
ought to receive a special remuneration in the shape of interest, profit, etc. [48] The powerful and ever-increasing assistance given by past labour to the living labour-process
under the form of means of production is, therefore, attributed to that form of past
labour in which it is alienated, as unpaid labour, from the worker himself, i.e, to its capitalistic form. The practical agents of capitalistic production and their
pettifogging ideologists are as unable to think of the means of production as separate
from the antagonistic social mask they wear to-day, as a slave-owner to think of the
worker himself as distinct from his character as a slave.

With a given degree of exploitation of labour-power, the mass of the surplus-value
produced is determined by the number of workers simultaneously exploited; and this
corresponds, although in varying proportions, with the magnitude of the capital. The
more, therefore, capital increases by means of successive accumulations, the more
does the sum of the value increase that is divided into consumption-fund and accumulation-fund.
The capitalist can, therefore, live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more
"abstinence." And, finally, all the springs of production act with greater elasticity,
the more its scale extends with the mass of the capital advanced.

SECTION 5. THE SO-CALLED LABOUR-FUND

It has been shown in the course of this inquiry that capital is not a fixed magnitude,
but is a part of social wealth, elastic and constantly fluctuating with the division
of fresh surplus-value into revenue and additional capital. It has been seen further
that, even with a given magnitude of functioning capital, the labour-power, the science,
and the land (by which are to be understood, economically, all conditions of labour
furnished by Nature independently of man), embodied in it, form elastic powers of
capital, allowing it, within certain limits, a field of action independent of its
own magnitude. In this inquiry we have neglected all effects of the process of circulation,
effects which may produce very different degrees of efficiency in the same mass of
capital. And as we pre-supposed the limits set by capitalist production, that is to
say, pre-supposed the process of social production in a form developed by purely spontaneous
growth, we neglected any more rational combination, directly and systematically practicable
with the means of production, and the mass of labour-power at present disposable.
Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of
a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma
by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle
of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. [49] Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only
have been manufactured in England. [50] In the light of his dogma the commonest phenomena of the process of production, as,
e.g., its sudden expansions and contractions, nay, even accumulation itself, become perfectly
inconceivable. [51] The dogma was used by Bentham himself, as well as by Malthus, James Mill, MacCulloch,
etc., for an apologetic purpose, and especially in order to represent one part of
capital, namely, variable capital, or that part convertible into labour-power, as
a fixed magnitude. The material of variable capital, i.e, the mass of the means of subsistence it represents for the labourer, or the so-called
labour-fund, was fabled as a separate part of social wealth, fixed by natural laws
and unchangeable. To set in motion the part of social wealth which is to function
as constant capital, or, to express it in a material form, as means of production,
a definite mass of living labour is required. This mass is given technologically.
But neither is the number of labourers required to render fluid this mass of labour-power
given (it changes with the degree of exploitation of the individual labour-power),
nor is the price of this labour-power given, but only its minimum limit, which is
moreover very variable. The facts that lie at the bottom of this dogma are these:
on the one hand, the labourer has no right to interfere in the division of social
wealth into means of enjoyment for the non-labourer and means of production. [52] On the other hand, only in favourable and exceptional cases, has he the power to
enlarge the so-called labour-fund at the expense of the "revenue" of the wealthy.

What silly tautology results from the attempt to represent the capitalistic limits
of the labour-fund as its natural and social limits may be seen, e.g., in Professor
Fawcett. [53] "The circulating capital of a country," he says, "is its wage-fund. Hence, if we
desire to calculate the average money wages received by each labourer, we have simply
to divide the amount of this capital by the number of the labouring population." [54] That is to say, we first add together the individual wages actually paid, and then
we affirm that the sum thus obtained, forms the total value of the "labour-fund" determined
and vouchsafed to us by God and Nature. Lastly, we divide the sum thus obtained by
the number of labourers to find out again how much may come to each on the average.
An uncommonly knowing dodge this. It did not prevent Mr. Fawcett saying in the same
breath: "The aggregate wealth which is annually saved in England, is divided into
two portions; one portion is employed as capital to maintain our industry, and the
other portion is exported to foreign countries... Only a portion, and perhaps, not
a large portion of the wealth which is annually saved in this country, is invested
in our own industry. [55]

The greater part of the yearly accruing surplus-product, embezzled, because abstracted
without return of an equivalent, from the English labourer, is thus used as capital,
not in England, but in foreign countries. But with the additional capital thus exported,
a part of the labour-fund" invented by God and Bentham is also exported. [56]

[2] We here take no account of export trade, by means of which a nation can change articles
of luxury either into means of production or means of subsistence, and vice versà. In order to examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all
disturbing subsidiary circumstances, we must treat the whole world as one nation,
and assume that capitalist production is everywhere established and has possessed
itself of every branch of industry.

[3] Sismondi's analysis of accumulation suffers from the great defect, that he contents
himself, to too great an extent, with the phrase "conversion of revenue into capital,"
without fathoming the material conditions of this operation.

[6] The property of the capitalist in the product of the tabour of others "is a strict
consequence of the law of appropriation, the fundamental principle of which was, on
the contrary, the exclusive title of every labourer to the product of his own labour."
(Cherbuliez, "Richesse ou Pauvreti," Paris, 1841, p. 58, where, however, the dialectical
reversal is not properly developed.)

[7] NOTE: The following passage (to p. 551 "laws of capitalist appropriation.") has been
added to the English text in conformity with the 4th German edition.

[8] We may well, therefore, feel astonished at the cleverness Of Proudhon, who would
abolish capitalistic property by enforcing the eternal laws of property that are based
on commodity production!

[10] "The possessors of surplus-produce or capital." ("The Source and Remedy of the National
Difficulties. A Letter to Lord John Russell." Lond., 1821.)

[11] "Capital, with compound interest on every portion of capital saved, is so all engrossing
that all the wealth in the world from which income is derived, has long ago become
the interest on capital." (London, Economist, 19th July, 1851.)

[12] "No political economist of the present day can by saving mean.mere hoarding: and
beyond this contracted and insufficient proceeding, no use of the term in reference
to the national wealth can well be imagined,. but that which must arise from a different
application of what is saved, founded upon a real distinction between the different
kinds of labour maintained by it." (Malthus, l. c., pp. 38, 39.)

[13] Thus for instance, Balzac, who so thoroughly studied every shade of avarice, represents
the old usurer Gobseck as in his second childhood when he begins to heap up a hoard
of commodities.

[17] In spite of his "Logic," John St. Mill never detects even such faulty analysis as
this when made by his predecessors, an analysis which, even from the bourgeois standpoint
of the science, cries out for rectification. In every case he registers with the dogmatism
of a disciple, the confusion of his master's thoughts. So here: "The capital itself
in the longrun becomes entirely wages, and when replaced by the sale of produce becomes
wages again."

[18] In his description of the process of reproduction, and of accumulation, Adam Smith,
in many ways, not only made no advance, but even lost considerable ground, compared
with his predecessors, especially by the Physiocrats. Connected with the illusion
mentioned in the text, is the really wonderful dogma, left by him as an inheritance
to Political Economy, the dogma, that the price of commodities is made up of wages,
profit (interest) and rent, i.e., of wages and surplus-value. Starting from this basis, Storch naively confesses, "II
est impossible de ràsoudre le prix n6cessaire dans ses àlàments les plus simples."
(Storch, l. c., Petersb. Edit., 1815, t. ii., p. 141, note.) A fine science of economy
this, which declares it impossible to resolve the price of a commodity into its simplest
elements! This point will be further investigated in the seventh part of Book iii.

[19] The reader will notice, that the word revenue is used in a double sense: first, to
designate surplus-value so far as it is the fruit periodically yielded by capital;
secondly, to designate the part of that fruit which is periodically consumed by the
capitalist, or added to the fund that supplies his private consumption. I have retained
this double meaning because it harmonises with the language of the English and French
economists.

[20] Taking the usurer, that old-fashioned but ever renewed specimen of the capitalist
for his text, Luther shows very aptly that the love of power is an element in the
desire to get rich. "The heathen were able, by the light of reason, to conclude that
a usurer is a double-dyed thief and murderer. We Christians, however, hold them in
such honour, that we fairly worship them for the sake of their money.... Whoever eats
up, robs, and steals the nourishment of another, that man commits as great a murder
(so far as in him lies) as he who starves a man or utterly undoes him. Such does a
usurer, and sits the while safe on his stool, when he ought rather to be hanging on
the gallows, and be eaten by as many ravens as he has stolen guilders, if only there
were so much flesh on him, that so many ravens could stick their beaks in and share
it. Meanwhile, we hang the small thieves.... Little thieves are put in the stocks,
great thieves go flaunting in gold and silk.... Therefore is there, on this earth,
no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than a gripe-money, and usurer, for he wants
to be God over all men.Turks, soldiers, and tyrants are also bad men, yet must they
let the people live, and Confess that they are bad, and enemies, and do, nay, must,
now and then show pity to some. But a usurer and money-glutton, such a one would iiave
the whole world perish of hunger and thirst, misery and want, so far as in him lies,
so that he may have all to himself, and every one may receive from him as from a God,
and be his serf for ever. To wear fine cloaks, golden chains, Tings, to wipe his mouth,
to be deemed and taken for a worthy, pious man .... Usury is a great huge monster,
like a werewolf, wbo lays waste all, more than any Cacus, Gerion or Antus. And yet
decks himself out, and would be thought pious, so that people may not see where the
oxen have gone, that he drags backwards into his den. But Hercules shall hear the
cry of the oxen and of his prisoners, and shall seek Cacus even in cliffs and among
rocks, and shall set the oxen loose again from the villain. For Cacus means the villain
that is a pious usurer, and steals, robs, eats everything. And will not own that he
has done it, and thinks no one will find him out, because the oxen, drawn backwards
into his den, make it seem, from their foot-prints, that they have been let out. So
the usurer would deceive the world, as though he were of use and gave the world oxen,-
which he, however, rends, and eats all alone... And since we break on the wheel, and
behead highwaymen, murderers and housebreakers, how much more ought we to break on
the wheel and kill.... hunt down, curse and behead all usurers." (Martin Luther, l.
c.)

[24] Even J. B. Say says: "Les àpargnes des riches se font aux dàpens des pauvres." "The
Roman proletarian lived almost entirely at the expense of society.... It can almost
be said that modern society lives at the expense of the proletarians, on what it keeps
out of the remuneration of labour." (Sismondi: "ttudes, &c.," t. i., p. 24.)

[28] (Senior, "Principes fondamentaux del'Écon. Pol." trad. Arrivabene. Paris, 1836, p.
308.) This was rather too much for the adherents of the old classical school. "Mr.
Senior has substituted for it" (the expression, labour and,profit) "the expression
labour and Abstinence. He who converts his revenue abstains from the enjoyment which
its expenditure would afford him. It is not the capital, but the use of the capital
productively, which is the cause of profits." (John Cazenove, l. c., p. 130, Note.)
John St. Mill, on the contrary, accepts on the one hand Ricardo's theory of profit,
and annexes on the other hand Senior's "remuneration of abstinence." He is as much
at home in absurd contradictions, as he feels at sea in the Hegelian contradiction,
the source of all dialectic. It has never occurred to the vulgar economist to make
the simple reftexion, that every human action may be viewed, as "abstinence" from
its opposite. Eating is abstinence from fasting, walking, abstinence from standing
still, working, abstinence from idling, idling, abstinence from working, &C. These
gentlemen would do well, to ponder, once in a way, over Spinoza's: "Determinatio est
Negatio."

[30] "No one ... will sow his wheat, for instance, and allow it to remain a twelvle month
in the ground, or leave his wine in a cellar for years, instead of consuming these
things or their equivalent at once ... unless he expects to acquire additional value,
&c." (Scrope, "Polit. Econ.," edit. by A. Potter, New York, 1841, pp. 133-134.)

[33] "The particular classes of income which yield the most abundantly to the progress
of national capital, change at different stages of their progress, and are, therefore,
entirely different in nations occupying different positions in that progress.... Profits
... unimportant source of accumulation, compared with wages and rents, in the earlier
stages of society.... When a considerable advance in the powers of national industry
has actually taken place, profits rise into comparative importance as a source of
accumulation." (Richard Jones, "Textbook, &c.," pp. 16, 21.)

[35] "Ricardo says: 'In different stages of society the accumulation of capital or of
the means of employing' (i.e., exploiting) 'labour is more or less rapid, and must
in all cases depend on the productive powers of labour. The productive powers of labour
are generally greatest where there is an abundance of fertile land.' If, in the first
sentence, the productive powers of labour mean the smallness of that aliquot part
of any produce that goes to those whose manual labour produced it, the sentence is
nearly identical, because the remaining aliquot part is the fund whence capital can,
if the owner pleases, be accumulated. But then this does not generally happen, where there is most fertile
land." ("Observations on Certain Verbal Disputes, &c." pp. 74, 75.)

[37] "An Essay on Trade and Commerce," Lond., 1770, P. 44. The Times of December, 1866, and January, 1867, in like manner published certain outpourings
of the heart of the English mine-owner, in which the happy lot of the Belgian miners
was pictured, who asked and received no more than was strictly necessary for them
to live for their "masters." The Belgian labourers have to suffer much, but to figure
in The Times as model labourers! In the beginning of February, 1867, came the answer: strike of
the Belgian miners at Marchienne, put down by powder and lead.

[39] The Northamptonshire manufacturer commits a pious fraud, pardonable in one whose
heart is so full. He nominally compares the life of the English and French manufacturing
labourer, but in the words just quoted he is painting, as he himself confesses in
his confused way, the French agricultural labourers.

[40] l. c., pp. 70, 71. Note in the 3rd German edition: To-day, thanks to the competition on the world-market, established since then, we
have advanced much further. "If China," says Mr. Stapleton, M.P., to his constituents,
"should become a great manufacturing country, I do not see how the manufacturing population
of Europe could sustain the contest without descending to the level of their competitors."
(Times, Sept. 3, 1873, p. 8.) The wished-for goal of English capital is no longer Continental
wages but Chinese.

[41] Benjamin Thompson: "Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical, &c.," 3 vols.,
Lond, 1796-1802, vol. i., p. 294. In his "The State of the Poor, or an History of
the labouring Classes in England, &c.," Sir F. M. Eden strongly recommends the Rumfordian
beggar-soup to workhouse overseers, and reproachfully wams the English labourers that
"many poor people, particularly in Scotland, live, and that very comfortably, for
months together, upon oat-meal and barley-meal, mixed with only water and salt." (l.
c., vol. i, book i., ch. 2, p. 503.) The same sort of hints in the 19th century. "The
most wholesome mixtures of flour having been refused (by the English agricultural
labouTer)... in Scotland, where education is better, this prejudice is, probably,
unknown." (Charles H. Parry, M. D., "The Question of the Necessecity of the Existing
Corn Laws Considered." London, 1816,, p. 69.) This same Parry, however, complains
that the English labourer is now (1815) in a much worse condition than in Eden's time
(1797.)

[42] From the reports of the last Parliamentary Commission on adulteration of means of
subsistence, it will be seen that the adulteration even of medicines is the rule,
not the exception in England. E.g., the examination of 34 specimens of opium, purchased
of as many different chemists in London, showed that 31 were adulterated with poppy
heads, wheat-flour, gum, clay, sand, &c. Several did not contain an atom of morphia.

[43] G. B. Newnham (barrister-at-law): "A Review of the Evidence before the Committee
of the two Houses of Parliament on the Com Laws." Lond., 1815, p. 20, note.

[45] C. H. Parry, l. c., pp. 77, 69. The landlords, on their side, not only "indemnified"
themselves for the Anti-Jacobin War, which they waged in the name of England, but
enriched themselves enormously. Their rents doubled, trebled, quadrupled, "and in
one instance, increased sixfold in eighteen years." (I. c., pp. 100, 101.)

[47] Classic economy has, on account of a deficient analysis of the labour-process, and
of the process of creating value-, never properly grasped this weighty element of
reproduction, as may be seen in Ricardo; he says, e.g., whatever the change in productive power, "a million men always produce in manufactures
the same value." This is accurate, if the extension and degree of Intensity of their
labour are given. But it does not prevent (this Ricardo overlooks in certain conclusions
he draws) a million men with different powers of productivity in their labour, turning
into products very different masses of the means of production, and therefore preserving
in their products very different masses of value; in consequence of which the values
of the products yielded may vary considerably. Ricardo has, it may be noted in passing,
tried in vain to make clear to J. B. Say, by that very example, the difference between
use-value (which he here calls wealth or material riches) and exchange-value. Say
answers: "Quant à la difficulté qu'élève Mr. Ricardo en disant que, par des procédés
mieux entendus un million de personnes peuvent produire deux fois, trois fois autant
de richesses, sans produire plus de valeurs, cette difficulté n'est pas une lorsque
l'on considére, ainsi qu'on le doit, la production comme un échange dans lequel on
donne les services productifs de son travail, de sa terre, et de ses capitaux, pour
obtenir des produits. C'est par le moyen de ces services productifs, que nous acquérons
tous les produits qui sont au monde. Or... nous sommes d'autant plus riches, nos services
productifs ont d'autant plus de valeur qu'ils obtiennent dans l'échange appelé production
une plus grande quantité de choses utiles." (J. B. Say, "Lettres à M. Malthus," Paris,
1820, pp. 168, 169.) The "difficulté" — it exists for him, not for Ricardo — that
Say means to clear up is this: Why does not the exchange-value of the use-values increase,
when their quantity increases in consequence of increased productive power of labour?
Answer: the difficulty is met by calling use-value, exchange-value, if you please.
Exchange-value is a thing that is connected one way or another with exchange. If therefore
production is called an exchange of labour and means of production against the product,
it is clear as day that you obtain more exchange-value in proportion as the production
yields more use-value. In other words, the more use-values, e.g., stockings, a working-day
yields to the stocking-manufacturer, the richer is he in stockings. Suddenly, however,
Say recollects that "with a greater quantity" of stockings their "price" (which of
course has nothing to do with their exchange-value!) falls "parce que la concurrence
les (les producteurs) oblige a donner les produits pour ce qu'its leur content...
But whence does the profit come, if the capitalist sells the commodities at cost-price?
Never mind! Say declares that, in consequence of increased productivity, every one
now receives in return for a given equivalent two pairs of stockings instead of one
as before. The result he arrives at, is precisely that proposition of Ricardo that
he aimed at disproving. After this mighty effort of thought, he triumphantly apostrophises
Malthus in the words: "Telle est, monsieur, la doctrine bien liée, sates laquelle
il est impossible, je le déclare, d'expliquer les plus grandes difficultés de l'économie
politique, et notamment, comment il se peut qu'une nation soit plus riche lorsque
ses produits diminuent de valeur, quoique la richesse soit,de la valeur." (I. c.,
p. 170.) An English economist remarks upon the conjuring tricks of the same nature
that appear in Say's "Lettres": "Those affected ways of talking make up in general
that which M. Say is pleased to call his doctrine and which he earnestly urges Malthus
to teach at Hertford, as it is already taught 'dans plusieurs parties de I'Europe.'
He says, 'Si vous trbuvez une physionomie de paradoxe à toutes ces propositions, voyez
les choses qu'elles expriment, et j'ose croire queues vous paraitront fort simples
et fort raisonnables.' Doubtless, and in consequence of the same process, they will
appear everything else, except original." ("An Inquiry into those Principles Respecting
the Nature of Demand, &c.," pp. 116, 110.)

[48] MacCulloch took out a patent for "wages of past labour," long before Senior did for
"wages of abstinence."

[50] Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian
Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted
about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham.
He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with
esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature.
This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this
to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the
principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with
human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it.
With the driest naiveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper,
as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world,
is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future.
The Christian religion, e.g., is "useful," "because it forbids in the name of religion
the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law." Artistic criticism
is "harmful," because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper,
etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, "nuila dies sine line!,"
piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should
call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.

[51] "Political economists are too apt to consider a certain quantity of capital and a
certain number of labourers as productive instruments of uniform power, or operating
with a certain uniform intensity.... Those... who maintain ... that commodities are
the sole agents of production ... -prove that production could never be enlarged,
for it requires as an indispensable condition to such an enlargement that food, raw
materials, and tools should be previously augmented; which is in fact maintaining
that no increase of production can take place without a previous increase, or, in
other words, that an increase is impossible." (S. Bailey: "Money and its Vicissitudes,"
pp. 58 and 70.) Bailey criticises the dogma mainly from the point of view of the process
of circulation.

[52] John Stuart Mill, in his "Principles of Political Economy," says: "The really exhausting
and the really repulsive labours instead of being better paid than others, are almost
invariably paid the worst of all.... The more revolting the occupation, the more certain
it is to receive the minimum of remuneration.... The hardships and the earnings, instead
of being directly proportional, as in any just arrangements of society they would
be, are generally in an inverse ratio to one another." To avoid misunderstanding,
let me say that although men like John Stuart Mill are to blame for the contradiction
between their traditional economic dogmas and their modem tendencies, it would be
very wrong to class them with the herd of vulgar economic apologists.

[53] H. Fawcett, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge. "The Economic position of
the British labourer." London, 1865, p. 120.

[54] I must here remind the reader that the categories, "variable and constant capital,"
were first used by me. Political Economy since the time of Adam Smith has confusedly
mixed up the essential distinctions involved in these categories, with the mere formal
differences, arising out of the process of circulation, of fixed and circulating capital.
For further details on this point, see Book II., Part II.

[56] It might be said that not only capital, but also labourers, in the shape of emigrants,
are annually exported from England. In the text, however, there is no question of
the peculium of the emigrants, who are in great part not labourers. The sons of farmers
make up a great part of them. The additional capital annually transported abroad to
be put out at interest is in much greater proportion to the annual accumulation than
the yearly emigration is to the yearly increase of population.

SECTION 1.THE INCREASED DEMAND FOR LABOUR-POWER THAT ACCOMPANIES ACCUMULATION, THE
COMPOSITION OF CAPITAL REMAINING THE SAME

In this chapter we consider the influence of the growth of capital on the lot of the
labouring class. The most important factor in this inquiry is the composition of capital
and the changes it undergoes in the course of the process of accumulation.

The composition of capital is to be understood in a two-fold sense. On the side of
value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital
or value of the means of production, and variable capital or value of labour-power,
the sum total of wages. On the side of material, as it functions in the process of
production, all capital is divided into means of production and living labour-power.
This latter composition is determined by the relation between the mass of the means
of production employed, on the one hand, and the mass of labour necessary for their
employment on the other. I call the former the value-composition, the latter the technical composition of capital.

Between the two there is a strict correlation. To express this, I call the value-composition
of capital, in so far as it is determined by its technical composition and mirrors
the changes of the latter, the organic composition of capital. Wherever I refer to the composition of capital, without further qualification,
its organic composition is always understood.

The many individual capitals invested in a particular branch of production have, one
with another, more or less different compositions. The average of their individual
compositions gives us the composition of the total capital in this branch of production.
Lastly, the average of these averages, in all branches of production, gives us the
composition of the total social capital of a country, and with this alone are we,
in the last resort, concerned in the following investigation.

Growth of capital involves growth of its variable constituent or of the part invested
in labour-power. A part of the surplus-value turned into additional capital must always
be re-transformed into variable capital, or additional labour-fund. If we suppose
that, all other circumstances remaining the same, the composition of capital also
remains constant (i.e., that a definite mass of means of production constantly needs the same mass of labour-power
to set it in motion), then the demand for labour and the subsistence-fund of the labourers
clearly increase in the same proportion as the capital, and the more rapidly, the
more rapidly the capital increases. Since the capital produces yearly a surplus-value,
of which one part is yearly added to the original capital; since this increment itself
grows yearly along with the augmentation of the capital already functioning; since
lastly, under special stimulus to enrichment, such as the opening of new markets,
or of new spheres for the outlay of capital in consequence of newly developed social
wants, &c., the scale of accumulation may be suddenly extended, merely by a change
in the division of the surplus-value or surplus-product into capital and revenue,
the requirements of accumulating capital may exceed the increase of labour-power or
of the number of labourers; the demand for labourers may exceed the supply, and, therefore,
wages may rise. This must, indeed, ultimately be the case if the conditions supposed
above continue. For since in each year more labourers are employed than in its predecessor,
sooner or later a point must be reached, at which the requirements of accumulation
begin to surpass the customary supply of labour, and, therefore, a rise of wages takes
place. A lamentation on this score was heard in England during the whole of the fifteenth,
and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. The more or less favourable circumstances
in which the wage-working class supports and multiplies itself, in no way alter the
fundamental character of capitalist production. As simple reproduction constantly reproduces the capital-relation itself, i.e., the relation of capitalists on the one hand, and wage-workers on the other, so
reproduction on a progressive scale, i.e., accumulation, reproduces the capital-relation on a progressive scale, more capitalists
or larger capitalists at this pole, more wage-workers at that. The reproduction of
a mass of labour-power, which must incessantly re-incorporate itself with capital
for that capital's self-expansion; which cannot get free from capital, and whose enslavement
to capital is only concealed by the variety of individual capitalists to whom it sells
itself, this reproduction of labour-power forms, in fact, an essential of the reproduction
of capital itself. Accumulation of capital is, therefore, increase of the proletariat.
[1]

Classical economy grasped this fact so thoroughly that Adam Smith, Ricardo, &c., as
mentioned earlier, inaccurately identified accumulation with the consumption, by the
productive labourers, of all the capitalised, part of the surplus-product, or with
its transformation into additional wage-labourers. As early as 1696 John Bellers says:
"For if one had a hundred thousand acres of land and as many pounds in money, and
as many cattle, without a labourer, what would the rich man be, but a labourer? And
as the labourers make men rich, so the more labourers there will be, the more rich
men ... the labour of the poor being the mines of the rich." [2] So also Bernard de Mandeville at the beginning of the eighteenth century: "It would
be easier, where property is well secured, to live without money than without poor;
for who would do the work? ... As they [the poor] ought to be kept from starving,
so they should receive nothing worth saving. If here and there one of the lowest class
by uncommon industry, and pinching his belly, lifts himself above the condition he
was brought up in, nobody ought to hinder him; nay, it is undeniably the wisest course
for every person in the society, and for every private family to be frugal; but it
is the interest of all rich nations, that the greatest part of the poor-should almost
never be idle, and yet continually spend what they get.... Those that get their living
by their daily labour ... have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their
wants which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure. The only thing then that
can render the labouring man industrious, is a moderate quantity of money, for as
too little will, according as his temper is, either dispirit or make him desperate,
so too much will make him insolent and lazy.... From what has been said, it is manifest,
that, in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists
in a multitude of laborious poor; for besides, that they are the never-failing nursery
of fleets and armies, without them there could be no enjoyment, and no product of any country could be valuable. "To make
the society" [which of course consists of non-workers] "happy and people easier under
the meanest circumstances, it is requisite that great numbers of them should be ignorant
as well as poor; knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our desires, and the fewer
things a man wishes for, the more easily his necessities may be supplied." [3] What Mandeville, an honest, clear-headed man, had not yet seen, is that the mechanism
of the process of accumulation itself increases, along with the capital, the mass
of "labouring poor," i.e., the wage-labourers, who turn their labour-power into an increasing power of self-expansion
of the growing capital, and even by doing so must eternise their dependent relation
on their own product, as personified in the capitalists. In reference to this relation
of dependence, Sir F. M. Eden in his "The State of the Poor, an History of the Labouring
Classes in England," says, "the natural produce of our soil is certainly not fully
adequate to our subsistence; we can neither be clothed, lodged nor fed but in consequence
of some previous labour. A portion at least of the society must be indefatigably employed .... There
are others who, though they 'neither toil nor spin,' can yet command the produce of
industry, but who owe their exemption from labour solely to civilisation and order
.... They are peculiarly the creatures of civil institutions, [4] which have recognised that individuals may acquire property by various other means besides the exertion
of labour.... Persons of independent fortune ... owe their superior advantages by
no means to any superior abilities of their own, but almost entirely ... to the industry
of others. It is not the possession of land, or of money, but the command of labour
which distinguishes the opulent from the labouring part of the community .... This
[scheme approved by Eden] would give the people of property sufficient (but by no
means too much) influence and authority over those who ... work for them; and it would
place such labourers, not in an abject or servile condition, but in such a state of
easy and liberal dependence as all who know human nature, and its history, will allow
to be necessary for their own comfort." [5] Sir F. M. Eden, it may be remarked in passing, is the only disciple of Adam Smith
during the eighteenth century that produced any work of importance. [6]

Under the conditions of accumulation supposed thus far, which conditions are those
most favourable to the labourers, their relation of dependence upon capital takes
on a form endurable or, as Eden says: "easy and liberal." Instead of becoming more
intensive with the growth of capital, this relation of dependence only becomes more
extensive, i.e., the sphere of capital's exploitation and rule merely extends with its own dimensions
and the number of its subjects. A larger part of their own surplus-product, always
increasing and continually transformed into additional capital, comes back to them
in the shape of means of payment, so that they can extend the circle of their enjoyments;
can make some additions to their consumption-fund of clothes, furniture, &c., and
can lay by small reserve-funds of money. But just as little as better clothing, food,
and treatment, and a larger peculium, do away with the exploitation of the slave,
so little do they set aside that of the wage-worker. A rise in the price of labour,
as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length
and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow
of a relaxation of the tension of it. In the controversies on this subject the chief
fact has generally been overlooked, viz., the differentia specifica of capitalistic production. Labour-power is sold to-day, not with a view of satisfying,
by its service or by its product, the personal needs of the buyer. His aim is augmentation of his capital, production of commodities containing more
labour than he pays for, containing therefore a portion of value that costs him nothing,
and that is nevertheless realised when the commodities are sold. Production of surplus-value
is the absolute law of this mode of production. Labour-power is only saleable so far
as it preserves the means of production in their capacity of capital, reproduces its
own value as capital, and yields in unpaid labour a source of additional capital.
[7] The conditions of its sale, whether more or less favourable to the labourer, include
therefore the necessity of its constant re-selling, and the constantly extended reproduction
of all wealth in the shape of capital. Wages, as we have seen, by their very nature,
always imply the performance of a certain quantity of unpaid labour on the part of
the labourer. Altogether, irrespective of the case of a rise of wages with a falling
price of labour, &c., such an increase only means at best a quantitative diminution
of the unpaid labour that the worker has to supply. This diminution can never reach
the point at which it would threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts
as to the rate of wages (and Adam Smith has already shown that in such a conflict,
taken on the whole, the master is always master), a rise in the price of labour resulting
from accumulation of capital implies the following alternative:

Either the price of labour keeps on rising, because its rise does not interfere with
the progress of accumulation. In this there is nothing wonderful, for, says Adam Smith,
"after these (profits) are diminished, stock may not only continue to increase, but
to increase much faster than before.... A great stock, though with small profits,
generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits." (l. c., ii, p.
189.) In this case it is evident that a diminution in the unpaid labour in no way
interferes with the extension of the domain of capital. — Or, on the other hand, accumulation
slackens in consequence of the rise in the price of labour, because the stimulus of
gain is blunted. The rate of accumulation lessens; but with its lessening, the primary
cause of that lessening vanishes, i.e., the disproportion between capital and exploitable labour-power. The mechanism of
the process of capitalist production removes the very obstacles that it temporarily
creates. The price of labour falls again to a level corresponding with the needs of
the self-expansion of capital, whether the level be below, the same as, or above the
one which was normal before the rise of wages took place. We see thus: In the first
case, it is not the diminished rate either of the absolute, or of the proportional,
increase in labour-power, or labouring population, which causes capital to be in excess,
but conversely the excess of capital that makes exploitable labour-power insufficient.
In the second case, it is not the increased rate either of the absolute, or of the
proportional, increase in labour-power, or labouring population, that makes capital
insufficient; but, conversely, the relative diminution of capital that causes the
exploitable labour-power, or rather its price, to be in excess. It is these absolute
movements of the accumulation of capital which are reflected as relative movements
of the mass of exploitable labour-power, and therefore seem produced by the latter's
own independent movement. To put it mathematically: the rate of accumulation is the independent, not the dependent,
variable; the rate of wages, the dependent, not the independent, variable. Thus, when
the industrial cycle is in the phase of crisis, a general fall in the price of commodities
is expressed as a rise in the value of money, and, in the phase of prosperity, a general
rise in the price of commodities, as a fall in the value of money. The so-called currency
school concludes from this that with high prices too much, with low prices too little
[8] money is in circulation. Their ignorance and complete misunderstanding of facts [9] are worthily paralleled by the economists, who interpret the above phenomena of accumulation
by saying that there are now too few, now too many wage-labourers.

The law of capitalist production, that is at the bottom of the pretended "natural
law of population," reduces itself simply to this: The correlation between accumulation
of capital and rate of wages is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid
labour transformed into capital, and the additional paid labour necessary for the
setting in motion of this additional capital. It is therefore in no way a relation
between two magnitudes, independent one of the other: on the one hand, the magnitude
of the capital; on the other, the number of the labouring population; it is rather,
at bottom, only the relation between the unpaid and the paid labour of the same labouring
population. If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working-class, and accumulated
by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires
an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances
remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion. But. as soon as this
diminution touches the point at which the surplus-labour that nourishes capital is
no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue
is capitalised accumulation lags, and the movement of rise in wages receives a check.
The rise of wages therefore is confined within limits that not only leave intact the
foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on a progressive
scale. The law of capitalistic accumulation, metamorphosed by economists into pretended
law of Nature, in reality merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution
in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which
could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever-enlarging scale, of
the capitalistic relation. It cannot be otherwise in a mode of production in which
the labourer exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead
of, on the contrary, material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development
on the part of the labourer. As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his
own brain, so in capitalistic production, he is governed by the products of his own
hand. [10]

SECTION 2. RELATIVE DIMINUTION OF THE VARIABLE PART OF CAPITAL SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH
THE PROGRESS OF ACCUMULATION AND OF THE CONCENTRATION THAT ACCOMPANIES IT

According to the economists themselves, it is neither the actual extent of social
wealth, nor the magnitude of the capital already functioning, that lead to a rise
of wages, but only the constant growth of accumulation and the degree of rapidity
of that growth. (Adam Smith, Book I., chapter 8.) So far, we have only considered
one special phase of this process, that in which the increase of capital occurs along
with a constant technical composition of capital. But the process goes beyond this
phase.

Once given the general basis of the capitalistic system, then, in the course of accumulation,
a point is reached at which the development of the productivity of social labour becomes
the most powerful lever of accumulation. "The same cause," says Adam Smith, "which
raises the wages of labour, the increase of stock, tends to increase its productive
powers, and to make a smaller quantity of labour produce a greater quantity of work."

Apart from natural conditions, such as fertility of the soil, &C., and from the skill
of independent and isolated producers (shown rather qualitatively in the goodness
than quantitatively in the mass of their products), the degree of productivity of
labour, in a given society, is expressed in the relative extent of the means of production
that one labourer, during a given time, with the same tension of labour-power, turns
into products. The mass of the means of production which he thus transforms, increases
with the productiveness of his labour. But those means of production play a double
part. The increase of some is a consequence, that of the others a condition of the
increasing productivity of labour. E.g., with the division of labour in manufacture, and with the use of machinery, more raw
material is worked up in the same time, and, therefore, a greater mass of raw material
and auxiliary substances enter into the labour-process. That is the consequence of
the increasing productivity of labour. On the other hand, the mass of machinery, beasts
of burden, mineral manures, drain-pipes, &c., is a condition of the increasing productivity
of labour. So also is it with the means of production concentrated in buildings, furnaces,
means of transport, &c. But whether condition or consequence, the growing extent of
the means of production, as compared with the labour-power incorporated with them,
is an expression of the growing productiveness of labour. The increase of the latter
appears, therefore, in the diminution of the mass of labour in proportion to the mass
of means of production moved by it, or in the diminution of the subjective factor
of the labour-process as compared with the objective factor.

This change in the technical composition of capital, this growth in the mass of means
of production, as compared with the mass of the labour-power that vivifies them, is
reflected again in its value-composition, by the increase of the constant constituent
of capital at the expense of its variable constituent. There may be, e.g., originally 50 per cent. of a capital laid out in means of production, and 50 per
cent. in labour-power; later on, with the development of the productivity of labour,
80 per cent. in means of production, 20 per cent. in labour-power, and so on. This
law of the progressive increase in constant capital, in proportion to the variable,
is confirmed at every step (as already shown) by the comparative analysis of the prices
of commodities, whether we compare different economic epochs or different nations
in the same epoch. The relative magnitude of the element of price, which represents
the value of the means of production only, or the constant part of capital consumed,
is in direct, the relative magnitude of the other element of price that pays labour
(the variable part of capital) is in inverse proportion to the advance of accumulation.

This diminution in the variable part of capital as compared with the constant, or
the altered value-composition of the capital, however, only shows approximately the
change in the composition of its material constituents. If, e.g., the capital-value employed to-day in spinning is 7/8 constant and 1/8 variable, whilst
at the beginning of the 18th century it was 1/2 constant and 1/2 variable, on the
other hand, the mass of raw material, instruments of labour, &c., that a certain quantity
of spinning labour consumes productively to-day, is many hundred times greater than
at the beginning of the 18th century. The reason is simply that, with the increasing
productivity of labour, not only does the mass of the means of production consumed
by it increase, but their value compared with their mass diminishes. Their value therefore
rises absolutely, but not in proportion to their mass. The increase of the difference
between constant and variable capital, is, therefore, much less than that of the difference
between the mass of the means of production into which the constant, and the mass
of the labour-power into which the variable, capital is converted. The former difference
increases with the latter, but in a smaller degree.

But, if the progress of accumulation lessens the relative magnitude of the variable
part of capital, it by no means, in doing this, excludes the possibility of a rise
in its absolute magnitude. Suppose that a capital-value at first is divided into 50
per cent. of constant and 50 per cent. of variable capital; later into 80 per cent.
of constant and 20 per cent. of variable. If in the meantime the original capital,
say £6,000, has increased to £18,000, its variable constituent has also increased.
It was £3,000, it is now £3,600. But where as formerly an increase of capital by 20
per cent. would have sufficed to raise the demand for labour 20 per cent., now this
latter rise requires a tripling of the original capital.

In Part IV. it was shown, how the development of the productiveness of social labour
pre-supposes co-operation on a large scale; how it is only upon this supposition that
division and combination of labour can be organised, and the means of production economised
by concentration on a vast scale; how instruments of labour which, from their very
nature, are only fit for use in common, such as a system of machinery, can be called
into being; how huge natural forces can be pressed into the service of production;
and how the transformation can be effected of the process of production into a technological
application of science. On the basis of the production of commodities, where the means
of production are the property of private persons, and where the artisan therefore
either produces commodities, isolated from and independent of others, or sells his
labour-power as a commodity, because he lacks the means for independent industry,
co-operation on a large scale can realise itself only in the increase of individual
capitals, only in proportion as the -means of social production and the means of subsistence
are transformed into the private property of capitalists. The basis of the production
of commodities can admit of production on a large scale in the capitalistic form alone.
A certain accumulation of capital, in the hands of individual producers of commodities,
forms therefore the necessary preliminary of the specifically capitalistic mode of
production. We had, therefore, to assume that this occurs during the transition from
handicraft to capitalistic industry. It may be called primitive accumulation, because
it is the historic basis, instead of the historic result of specifically capitalist
production. How it itself originates, we need not here inquire as yet. It is enough
that it forms the starting-point. But all methods for raising the social productive
power of labour that are developed on this basis, are at the same time methods for
the increased production of surplus-value or surplus-product, which in its turn is
the formative element of accumulation. They are, therefore, at the same time methods
of the production of capital by capital, or methods of its accelerated accumulation.
The continual re-transformation of surplus-value into capital now appears in the shape
of the increasing magnitude of the capital that enters into the process of production.
This in turn is the basis of an extended scale of production, of the methods for raising
the productive power of labour that accompany it, and of accelerated production of
surplus-value. If, therefore, a certain degree of accumulation of capital appears
as a condition of the specifically capitalist mode of production, the latter causes
conversely an accelerated accumulation of capital. With the accumulation of capital,
therefore, the specifically capitalistic mode of production develops, and with the
capitalist mode of production the accumulation of capital. Both these economic factors
bring about, in the compound ratio of the impulses they reciprocally give one another,
that change in the technical composition of capital by which the variable constituent
becomes always smaller and smaller as compared with the constant.

Every individual capital is a larger or smaller concentration of means of production,
with a corresponding command over a larger or smaller labour-army. Every accumulation
becomes the means of new accumulation. With the increasing mass of wealth which functions
as capital, accumulation increases the concentration of that wealth in the hands of
individual capitalists, and thereby widens the basis of production on a large scale
and of the specific methods of capitalist production. The growth of social capital
is effected by the growth of many individual capitals. All other circumstances remaining
the same, individual capitals, and with them the concentration of the means of production,
increase in such proportion as they form aliquot parts of the total social capital.
At the same time portions of the original capitals disengage themselves and function
as new independent capitals. Besides other causes, the division of property, within
capitalist families, plays a great part in this. With the accumulation of capital,
therefore, the number of capitalists grows to a greater or less extent. Two points
characterise this kind of concentration which grows directly out of, or rather is
identical with, accumulation. First: The increasing concentration of the social means
of production in the hands of individual capitalists is, other things remaining equal,
limited by the degree of increase of social wealth. Second: The part of social capital
domiciled in each particular sphere of production is divided among many capitalists
who face one another as independent commodity-producers competing with each other.
Accumulation and the concentration accompanying it are, therefore, not only scattered
over many points, but the increase of each functioning capital is thwarted by the
formation of new and the sub-division of old capitals. Accumulation, therefore, presents
itself on the one hand as increasing concentration of the means of production, and
of the command over labour; on the other, as repulsion of many individual capitals
one from another.

This splitting-up of the total social capital into many individual capitals or the
repulsion of its fractions one from another, is counteracted by their attraction.
This last does not mean that simple concentration of the means of production and of
the command over labour, which is identical with accumulation. It is concentration
of capitals already formed, destruction of their individual independence, expropriation
of capitalist by capitalist, transformation of many small into few large capitals.
This process differs from the former in this, that it only pre-supposes a change in
the distribution of capital already to hand, and functioning; its field of action
is therefore not limited by the absolute growth of social wealth, by the absolute
limits of accumulation. Capital grows in one place to a huge mass in a single hand,
because it has in another place been lost by many. This is centralisation proper,
as distinct from accumulation and concentration.

The laws of this centralisation of capitals, or of the attraction of capital by capital,
cannot be developed here. A brief hint at a few facts must suffice. The battle of
competition is fought by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities demands,
caeteris paribus, on the productiveness of labour, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore,
the larger capitals beat the smaller. It will further be remembered that, with the
development of the capitalist mode of production, there is an increase in the minimum
amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions.
The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry
has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages in direct
proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic
capitals. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly
pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish. Apart from this, with capitalist
production an altogether new force comes into play — the credit system, which [11] in its first stages furtively creeps in as the humble assistant of accumulation,
drawing into the hands of individual or associated capitalists, by invisible threads,
the money resources which lie scattered, over the surface of society, in larger or
smaller amounts; but it soon becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition
and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralisation
of capitals.

Commensurately with the development of capitalist production and accumulation there
develop the two most powerful levers of centralisation — competition and credit. At
the same time the progress of accumulation increases the material amenable to centralisation,
i.e., the individual capitals, whilst the expansion of capitalist production creates,
on the one hand, the social want, and, on the other, the technical means necessary
for those immense industrial undertakings which require a previous centralisation
of capital for their accomplishment. To-day, therefore, the force of attraction, drawing
together individual capitals, and the tendency to centralisation are stronger than
ever before. But if the relative extension and energy of the movement towards centralisation
is determined, in a certain degree, by the magnitude of capitalist wealth and superiority
of economic mechanism already attained, progress in centralisation does not in any
way depend upon a positive growth in the magnitude of social capital. And this is the specific difference between centralisation and concentration, the
latter being only another name for reproduction on an extended scale. Centralisation
may result from a mere change in the distribution of capitals already existing,from
a simple alteration in the quantitative grouping of the component parts of social
capital. Here capital can grow into powerful masses in a single hand because there
it has been withdrawn from many individual hands. In any given branch of industry
centralisation would reach its extreme limit if all the individual capitals invested
in it were fused into a single capital. [12] In a, given society the limit would be reached only when the entire social capital
was united in the hands of either a single capitalist or a single capitalist company.

Centralisation completes the work of accumulation by enabling industrial capitalists
to extend the scale of their operations. Whether this latter result is the consequence
of accumulation or centralisation, whether centralisation is accomplished by the violent
method of annexation — when certain capitals become such preponderant centres of attraction
for others that they shatter the individual cohesion of the latter and then draw the
separate fragments to themselves — or whether the fusion of a number of capitals already
formed or in process of formation takes place by the smoother process of organising
joint-stock companies — the economic effect remains the same. Everywhere the increased
scale of industrial establishments is the starting-point for a more comprehensive
organisation of the collective work of many, for a wider development of their material
motive forces — in other words, for the progressive transformation of isolated processes
of production, carried on by customary methods, into processes of production socially
combined and scientifically arranged.

But accumulation, the gradual increase of capital by reproduction as it passes from
the circular to the spiral form, is clearly a very slow procedure compared with centralisation,
which has only to change the quantitative groupings of the constituent parts of social
capital. The world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation
had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of
a railway. Centralisation, on the contrary, accomplished this in the twinkling of
an eye, by means of joint-stock companies. And whilst centralisation thus intensifies
and accelerates the effects of accumulation, it simultaneously extends and speeds
those revolutions in the technical composition of capital which raise its constant
portion at the expense of its variable portion, thus diminishing the relative demand
for labour.

The masses of capital fused together overnight by centralisation reproduce and multiply
as the others do, only more rapidly, thereby becoming new and powerful levers in social
accumulation. Therefore, when we speak of the progress of social accumulation we tacitly
include — to-day — the effects of centralisation.

The additional capitals formed in the normal course of accumulation (see Chapter XXIV,
Section 1) serve particularly as vehicles for the exploitation of new inventions and
discoveries, and industrial improvements in general. But in time the old capital also
reaches the moment of renewal from top to toe, when it sheds its skin and is reborn
like the others in a perfected technical form, in which a smaller quantity of labour
will suffice to set in motion a larger quantity of machinery and raw materials. The
absolute reduction in the demand for labour which necessarily follows from this is
obviously so much the greater the higher the degree in which the capitals undergoing
this process of renewal are already massed together by virtue of the centralisation
movement.

On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation
attracts fewer and fewer labourers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand,
the old capital periodically reproduced with change of composition, repels more and
more of the labourers formerly employed by it.

SECTION 3. PROGRESSIVE PRODUCTION OF A RELATIVE SURPLUS-POPULATION OR INDUSTRIAL RESERVE
ARMY

The accumulation of capital, though originally appearing as its quantitative extension
only, is effected, as we have seen, under a progressive qualitative change in its
composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its variable
constituent. [13]

The specifically capitalist mode of production, the development of the productive
power of labour corresponding to it, and the change thence resulting in the organic
composition of capital, do not merely keep pace with the advance of accumulation,
or with the growth of social wealth. They develop at a much quicker rate, because
mere accumulation, the absolute increase of the total social capital, is accompanied
by the centralisation of the individual capitals of which that total is made up; and
because the change in the technological composition of the additional capital goes
hand in hand with a similar change in the technological composition of the original
capital. With the advance of accumulation, therefore, the proportion of constant to
variable capital changes. If it was originally say 1:1, it now becomes successively
2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 5:1, 7:1, &c., so that, as the capital increases, instead of 1/2 of
its total value, only 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, 1/6, 1/8, &c., is transformed into labour-power,
and, on the other hand, 2/3, 3/4, 4/5, 5/6, 7/8 into means of production. Since the
demand for labour is determined not by the amount of capital as a whole, but by its
variable constituent alone, that demand falls progressively with the increase of the
total capital, instead of, as previously assumed, rising in proportion to it. It falls
relatively to the magnitude of the total capital, and at an accelerated rate, as this
magnitude increases. With the growth of the total capital, its variable constituent
or the labour incorporated in it, also does increase, but in a constantly diminishing
proportion. The intermediate pauses are shortened, in which accumulation works as
simple extension of production, on a given technical basis. It is not merely that
an accelerated accumulation of total capital, accelerated in a constantly growing
progression, is needed to absorb an additional number of labourers, or even, on account
of the constant metamorphosis of old capital, to keep employed those already functioning.
In its turn, this increasing accumulation and centralisation becomes a source of new
changes in the composition of capital, of a more accelerated diminution of its variable,
as compared with its constant constituent. This accelerated relative diminution of
the variable constituent, that goes along with the accelerated increase of the total
capital, and moves more rapidly than this increase, takes the inverse form, at the
other pole, of an apparently absolute increase of the labouring population, an increase
always moving more rapidly than that of the variable capital or the means of employment.
But in fact, it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and
produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant
population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion
of capital, and therefore a surplus-population.

Considering the social capital in its totality, the movement of its accumulation now
causes periodical changes, affecting it more or less as a whole, now distributes its
various phases simultaneously over the different spheres of production. In some spheres
a change in the composition of capital occurs without increase of its absolute magnitude,
as a consequence of simple centralisation; in others the absolute growth of capital
is connected with absolute diminution of its variable constituent, or of the labour-power
absorbed by it; in others again, capital continues growing for a time on its given
technical basis, and attracts additional labour-power in proportion to its increase, while at other times it undergoes organic
change, and lessens its variable constituent; in all spheres, the increase of the
variable part of capital, and therefore of the number of labourers employed by it,
is always connected with violent fluctuations and transitory production of surplus-population, whether
this takes the more striking form of the repulsion of labourers already employed,
or the less evident but not less real form of the more difficult absorption of the
additional labouring population through the usual channels. [14] With the magnitude of social capital already functioning, and the degree of its increase,
with the extension of the scale of production, and the mass of the labourers set in
motion, with the development of the productiveness of their labour, with the greater
breadth and fulness of all sources of wealth, there is also an extension of the scale
on which greater attraction of labourers by capital is accompanied by their greater
repulsion; the rapidity of the change in the organic composition of capital, and in its technical form increases, and an increasing number of spheres of production
becomes involved in this change, now simultaneously, now alternately. The labouring
population therefore produces, along with the accumulation of capital produced by
it, the means by which it itself is made relatively superfluous, is turned into a
relative surplus-population; and it does this to an always increasing extent. [15] This is a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production; and in
fact every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,
historically valid within its limits and only in so far as man has not interfered
with them.

But if a surplus labouring population is a necessary product of accumulation or of
the development of wealth on a capitalist basis, this surplus-population becomes,
conversely, the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence
of the capitalist mode of production. It forms a disposable industrial reserve army,
that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own
cost. Independently of the limits of the actual increase of population, it creates,
for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material
always ready for exploitation. With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness
of labour that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also;
it grows, not merely because the elasticity of the capital already functioning increases,
not merely because the absolute wealth of society expands, of which capital only forms
an elastic part, not merely because credit, under every special stimulus, at once
places an unusual part of this wealth at the disposal of production in the form of
additional capital; it grows, also, because the technical conditions of the process
of production themselves — machinery, means of transport, &c. — now admit of the rapidest
transformation of masses of surplus-product into additional means of production. The
mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable
into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production,
whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c.,
the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases,
there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive
points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. Overpopulation
supplies these masses. The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average
activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant
formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial
reserve army or surplus-population. In their turn, the varying phases of the industrial
cycle recruit the surplus-population, and become one of the most energetic agents
of its reproduction. This peculiar course of modem industry, which occurs in no earlier
period of human history, was also impossible in the childhood of capitalist production.
The composition of capital changed but very slowly. With its accumulation, therefore,
there kept pace, on the whole, a corresponding growth in the demand for labour. Slow
as was the advance of accumulation compared with that of more modem times, it found
a check in the natural limits of the exploitable labouring population, limits which
could only be got rid of by forcible means to be mentioned later. The expansion by
fits and starts of the scale of production is the preliminary to its equally sudden
contraction; the latter again evokes the former, but the former is impossible without
disposable human material, without an increase, in the number of labourers independently
of the absolute growth of the population. This increase is effected by the simple
process that constantly "sets free" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen
the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production. The whole
form of the movement of modem industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation
of a part of the labouring population into unemployed or half-employed hands. The
superficiality of Political Economy shows itself in the fact that it looks upon the
expansion and contraction of credit, which is a mere symptom of the periodic changes
of the industrial cycle, as their cause. As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into
a certain definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as
soon as it is once thrown into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction.
Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the varying accidents of the whole process,
which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity. When
this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political Economy then sees that the production
of a relative surplus-population — i.e., surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion of capital — is
a necessary condition of modern industry.

"Suppose," says H. Merivale, formerly Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, subsequently
employed in the English Colonial Office, "suppose that, on the occasion of some of
these crises, the nation were to rouse itself to the effort of getting rid by emigration
of some hundreds of thousands of superfluous arms, what would be the consequence?
That, at the first returning demand for labour, there would be a deficiency. However
rapid reproduction may be, it takes, at all events, the space of a generation to replace
the loss of adult labour. Now, the profits of our manufacturers depend mainly on the
power of making' use of the prosperous moment when demand is brisk, and thus compensating
themselves for the interval during which it is slack. This power is secured to them only by the command of machinery and of manual labour.
They must have hands ready by them, they must be able to increase the activity of
their operations when required, and to slacken it again, according to the state of
the market, or they cannot possibly maintain that pre-eminence in the race of competition
on which the wealth of the country is founded." [16] Even Malthus recognises overpopulation as a necessity of modem industry, though,
after his narrow fashion, he explains it by the absolute over-growth of the labouring
population, not by their becoming relatively supernumerary. He says: "Prudential habits
with regard to marriage, carried to a considerable extent among the labouring class
of a country mainly depending upon manufactures and commerce, might injure it....
From the nature of a population, an increase of labourers cannot be brought into market
in consequence of a particular demand till after the lapse of 16 or 18 years, and
the conversion of revenue into capital, by saving, may take place much more rapidly:
a country is always liable to an increase in the quantity of the funds for the maintenance
of labour faster than the increase of population." [17] After Political Economy has thus demonstrated the constant production of a relative
surplus-population of labourers to be a necessity of capitalistic accumulation, she
very aptly, in the guise of an old maid, puts in the mouth of her "beau ideal" of
a capitalist the following words addressed to those supernumeraries thrown on the
streets by their own creation of additional capital: — "We manufacturers do what we
can for you, whilst we are increasing that capital on which you must subsist, and
you must do the rest by accommodating your numbers to the means of subsistence." [18]

Capitalist production can by no means content itself with the quantity of disposable
labour-power which the natural increase of population yields. It requires for its
free play an industrial reserve army independent of these natural limits.

Up to this point it has been assumed that the increase or diminution of the variable
capital corresponds rigidly with the increase or diminution of the number of labourers
employed.

The number of labourers commanded by capital may remain the same, or even fall, while
the variable capital increases. This is the case if the individual labourer yields
more labour, and therefore his wages increase, and this although the price of labour
remains the same or even falls, only more slowly than the mass of labour rises. Increase
of variable capital, in this case, becomes an index of more labour, but not of more
labourers employed. It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given
quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if
the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases
in proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is
much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive.
Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.

We have seen that the development of the capitalist mode of production and of the
productive power of labour — at once the cause and effect of accumulation — enables
the capitalist, with the same outlay of variable capital, to set in action more labour
by greater exploitation (extensive or intensive) of each individual labour-power.
We have further seen that the capitalist buys with the same capital a greater mass
of labour-power, as he progressively replaces skilled labourers by less skilled, mature
labour-power by immature, male by female, that of adults by that of young persons
or children.

On the one hand, therefore, with the progress of accumulation, a larger variable capital
sets more labour in action without enlisting more labourers; on the other, a variable
capital of the same magnitude sets in action more labour with the same mass of labour-power;
and, finally, a greater number of inferior labour-powers by displacement of higher.

The production of a relative surplus-population, or the setting free of labourers,
goes on therefore yet more rapidly than the technical revolution of the process of
production that accompanies, and is accelerated by, the advance of accumulation; and
more rapidly than the corresponding diminution of the variable part of capital as
compared with the constant. If the means of production, as they increase in extent
and effective power, become to a less extent means of employment of labourers, this
state of things is again modified by the fact that in proportion as the productiveness
of labour increases, capital increases its supply of labour more quickly than its
demand for labourers. The over-work of the employed part of the working-class swells
the ranks of the reserve, whilst conversely the greater pressure that the latter by
its competition exerts on the former, forces these to submit to overwork and to subjugation
under the dictates of capital. The condemnation of one part of the working-class to
enforced idleness by the overwork of the other part, and the converse, becomes a means
of enriching the individual capitalists, [19] and accelerates at the same time the production of the industrial reserve army on
a scale corresponding with the advance of social accumulation. How important is this
element in the formation of the relative surplus-population, is shown by the example
of England. Her technical means for saving labour are colossal. Nevertheless, if to-morrow
morning labour generally were reduced to a rational amount, and proportioned to the
different sections of the working-class according to age and sex, the working population
to hand would be absolutely insufficient for the carrying on of national production
on its present scale. The great majority of the labourers now "unproductive" would
have to be turned into "productive" ones.

Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by
the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond
to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore, not determined
by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying
proportions in which the working-class is divided into active and reserve army, by
the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus-population, by the
extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. For Modern Industry with its decennial
cycles and periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are complicated
by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly. that would indeed
be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the action of capital dependent on the
absolute variation of the population, instead of regulating the demand and supply
of labour by the alternate expansion and contraction of capital, the labour-market
now appearing relatively under-full, because capital is expanding, now again over-full,
because it is contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According to them,
wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital. The higher wages stimulate the
working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on until the labour-market
becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to the supply of labour, becomes
insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the reverse of the medal. The working population
is little by little decimated as the result of the fall in wages, so that capital
is again in excess relatively to them, or, as others explain it, falling wages and
the corresponding increase in the exploitation of the labourer again accelerates accumulation,
whilst, at the same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working-class in
check. Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is less than the demand,
wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of motion this for developed capitalist production!
Before, in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase of the population
really fit for work could occur, the time would have been passed again and again,
during which the industrial campaign must have been carried through, the battle fought
and won.

Between 1849 and 1859, a rise of wages practically insignificant, though accompanied
by falling prices of corn, took place in the English agricultural districts. In Wiltshire,
e.g., the weekly wages rose from 7s. to 8s.; in Dorsetshire from 7s. or 8s., to 9s.,
&c. This was the result of an unusual exodus of the agricultural surplus-population
caused by the demands of war, the vast extension of railroads, factories, mines, &c.
The lower the wages, the higher is the proportion in which ever so insignificant a
rise of them expresses itself. If the weekly wage, e.g., is 20s. and it rises to 22s., that is a rise of 10 per cent.; but if it is only
7s. and it rises to 9s., that is a rise of 28 4/7 per cent., which sounds very fine.
Everywhere the farmers were howling, and the London Economist, with reference to these starvation-wages, prattled quite seriously of "a general
and substantial advance." [20] What did the farmers do now? Did they wait until, in consequence of this brilliant
remuneration, the agricultural labourers had so increased and multiplied that their
wages must fall again, as prescribed by the dogmatic economic brain? They introduced
more machinery, and in a moment the labourers were redundant again in a proportion
satisfactory even to the farmers. There was now "more capital" laid out in agriculture
than before, and in a more productive form. With this the demand for labour fell,
not only relatively, but absolutely.

The above economic fiction confuses the laws that regulate the general movement of
wages, or the ratio between the working-class — i.e., the total labour-power — and the total social capital, with the laws that distribute
the working population over the different spheres of production. If, e.g., in consequence of favourable circumstances, accumulation in a particular sphere of
production becomes especially active, and profits in it, being greater than the average
profits, attract additional capital, of course the demand for labour rises and wages
also rise. The higher wages draw a larger part of the working population into the
more favoured sphere, until it is glutted with labour-power, and wages at length fall
again to their average level or below it, if the pressure is too great. Then, not
only does the immigration of labourers into the branch of industry in question cease;
it gives place to their emigration. Here the political economist thinks he sees the
why and wherefore of an absolute increase of workers accompanying an increase of wages,
and of a diminution of wages accompanying an absolute increase of labourers. But he
sees really only the local oscillation of the labour-market in a particular sphere
of production — he sees only the phenomena accompanying the distribution of the working
population into the different spheres of outlay of capital, according to its varying
needs.

The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity,
weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm,
it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus-population is therefore the pivot
upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of
action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation
and to the domination of capital.

This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic apologetics.
It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new, or the extension of
old, machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant, the economic
apologist interprets this operation which "fixes" capital and by that very act sets
labourers "free," in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free capital
for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of these apologists.
What are set free are not only the labourers immediately turned out by the machines,
but also their future substitutes in the rising generation, and the additional contingent,
that with the usual extension of trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed.
They are now all "set free," and every new bit of capital looking out for employment
can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general
labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market
as many labourers as the machines threw upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that
of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs a greater, the general demand for
labour only increases to the extent of the excess of the employed over those "set
free." The impulse that additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have
given to the general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to
the extent of the labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say,
the mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute increase
of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general demand for labour.
And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible
death of the displaced labourers during the transition period that banishes them into
the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with increase
of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working-class. It is not a case
of two independent forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés. Capital works
on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the
demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the "setting
free" of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those
that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour,
to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law
of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As
soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the
same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the
productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their function
as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them;
as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves
depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus-population; as soon as, by
Trades' Unions, &c., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed
and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural
law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant,
Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the "eternal" and so to say "sacred"
law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the
"harmonious" action of this law. But, on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies,
e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with
it, the absolute dependence of the working-class upon the capitalist class, capital,
along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the "sacred" law of supply
and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State
interference.

SECTION 4. DIFFERENT FORMS OF THE RELATIVE SURPLUS-POPULATION.THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALISTIC
ACCUMULATION

The relative surplus-population exists in every possible form. Every labourer belongs
to it during the time when he is only partially employed or wholly unemployed. Not
taking into account the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases
of the industrial cycle impress on it, now an acute form during the crisis, then again
a chronic form during dull times — it has always three forms, the floating, the latent,
the stagnant.

In the centres of modern industry — factories, manufactures, ironworks, mines, &c.
— the labourers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses,
the number of those employed increasing on the whole, although in a constantly decreasing
proportion to the scale of production. Here the surplus-population exists in the floating
form.

In the automatic factories, as in all the great workshops, where machinery enters
as a factor, or where only the modern division of labour is carried out, large numbers
of boys are employed up to the age of maturity. When this term is once reached, only
a very small number continue to find employment in the same branches of industry,
whilst the majority are regularly discharged. This majority forms an element of the
floating surplus-population, growing with the extension of those branches of industry.
Part of them emigrates, following in fact capital that has emigrated. One consequence
is that the female population grows more rapidly than the male, teste England. That the natural increase of the number of labourers does not satisfy the
requirements of the accumulation of capital, and yet all the time is in excess of
them, is a contradiction inherent to the movement of capital itself. It wants larger
numbers of youthful labourers, a smaller number of adults. The contradiction is not
more glaring than that other one that there is a complaint of the want of hands, while
at the same time many thousands are out of work, because the division of labour chains
them to a particular branch of industry. [21]

The consumption of labour-power by capital is, besides, so rapid that the labourer,
half-way through his life, has already more or less completely lived himself out.
He falls into the ranks of the supernumeraries, or is thrust down from a higher to
a lower step in the scale. It is precisely among the work-people of modern industry
that we meet with the shortest duration of life. Dr. Lee, Medical Officer of Health
for Manchester, stated "that the average age at death of the Manchester ... upper
middle class was 38 years, while the average age at death of the labouring class was
17; while at Liverpool those figures were represented as 35 against 15. It thus appeared
that the well-to-do classes had a lease of life which was more than double the value
of that which fell to the lot of the less favoured citizens." [22] In order to conform to these circumstances, the absolute increase of this section
of the proletariat must take place under conditions that shall swell their numbers,
although the individual elements are used up rapidly. Hence, rapid renewal of the
generations of labourers (this law does not hold for the other classes of the population).
This social need is met by early marriages, a necessary consequence of the conditions
in which the labourers of modern industry live, and by the premium that the exploitation
of children sets on their production.

As soon as capitalist production takes possession of agriculture, and in proportion
to the extent to which it does so, the demand for an agricultural labouring population
falls absolutely, while the accumulation of the capital employed in agriculture advances,
without this repulsion being, as in non-agricultural industries, compensated by a
greater attraction. Part of the agricultural population is therefore constantly on
the point of passing over into an urban or manufacturing proletariat. and on the look-out
for circumstances favourable to this transformation. (Manufacture is used here in
the sense of all nonagricultural industries.) [23] This source of relative surplus-population is thus constantly flowing. But the constant
flow towards the towns pre-supposes, in the country itself, a constant latent surplus-population,
the extent of which becomes evident only when its channels of outlet open to exceptional
width. The agricultural labourer is therefore reduced to the minimum of wages, and
always stands with one foot already in the swamp of pauperism.

The third category of the relative surplus-population, the stagnant, forms a part
of the active labour army, but with extremely irregular employment. Hence it furnishes
to capital an inexhaustible reservoir of disposable labour-power. Its conditions of
life sink below the average normal level of the working-class; this makes it at once
the broad basis of special branches of capitalist exploitation. It is characterised
by maximum of working-time, and minimum of wages. We have learnt to know its chief
form under the rubric of "domestic industry." It recruits itself constantly from the supernumerary forces of modern industry and
agriculture, and specially from those decaying branches of industry where handicraft
is yielding to manufacture, manufacture to machinery. Its extent grows, as with the
extent and energy of accumulation, the creation of a surplus-population advances.
But it forms at the same time a self-reproducing and self-perpetuating element of
the working-class, taking a proportionally greater part in the general increase of
that class than the other elements. In fact, not only the number of births and deaths,
but the absolute size of the families stand in inverse proportion to the height of
wages, and therefore to the amount of means of subsistence of which the different
categories of labourers dispose. This law of capitalistic society would sound absurd
to savages, or even civilised colonists. It calls to mind the boundless reproduction
of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down. [24]

The lowest sediment of the relative surplus-population finally dwells in the sphere
of pauperism. Exclusive of vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in a word, the "dangerous"
classes, this layer of society consists of three categories. First, those able to
work. One need only glance superficially at the statistics of English pauperism to
find that the quantity of paupers increases with every crisis, and diminishes with
every revival of trade. Second, orphans and pauper children. These are candidates
for the industrial reserve army, and are, in times of great prosperity, as 1860, e.g., speedily and in large numbers enrolled in the active army of labourers. Third,
the demoralised and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to
their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed
the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with
the increase of dangerous machinery, of mines, chemical works, &c., the mutilated,
the sickly, the widows, &c. Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and
the dead weight of the industrial reserve army. Its production is included in that
of the relative surplus-population, its necessity in theirs; along with the surplus-population,
pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development
of wealth. It enters into the faux frais of capitalist production; but capital knows how to throw these. for the most part,
from its own shoulders on to those of the working-class and the lower middle class.

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its
growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness
of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop
the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal. The
relative mass of the industrial reserve army increases therefore with the potential
energy of wealth. But the greater this reserve army in proportion to the active labour-army,
the greater is the mass of a consolidated surplus-population, whose misery is in inverse
ratio to its torment of labour. The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of
the working-class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism.
This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation. Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis
of which does not concern us here.

The folly is now patent of the economic wisdom that preaches to the labourers the
accommodation of their number to the requirements of capital. The mechanism of capitalist
production and accumulation constantly effects this adjustment. The first word of
this adaptation is the creation of a relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve
army. Its last word is the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army
of labour, and the dead weight of pauperism.

The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to
the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively
diminishing expenditure of human power, this law, in a capitalist society — where
the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production
employ the labourer — undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher
the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the
means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence,
viz., the sale of their own labour-power for the increasing of another's wealth, or for
the self-expansion of capital. The fact that the means of production, and the productiveness
of labour, increase more rapidly than the productive population, expresses itself,
therefore, capitalistically in the inverse form that the labouring population always
increases more rapidly than the conditions under which capital can employ this increase
for its own self-expansion.

We saw in Part IV., when analysing the production of relative surplus-value: within
the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour
are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development
of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation
of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him
to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work
and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities
of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an
independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during
the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform
his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of
the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are
at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes
again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion
as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must
grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial
reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer
to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes
an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation
of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony
of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [25] This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various
forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly
to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to
pre-capitalistic modes of production.

The Venetian monk Ortes, one of the great economic writers of the 18th century, regards
the antagonism of capitalist production as a general natural law of social wealth.
"In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another (il bene
ed il male economico in una nazione sempre all, istessa misura): the abundance of
wealth with some people, is always equal to the want of it with others (la copia dei
beni in alcuni sempre eguale alia mancanza di essi in altri): the great riches of
a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries
of life for many others. The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and
its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others.
The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active," &c. [26] In a thoroughly brutal way about 10 years after Ortes, the Church of England parson,
Townsend, glorified misery as a necessary condition of wealth. "Legal constraint (to
labour) is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, whereas hunger is
not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive
to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions." Everything therefor
' e depends upon making hunger permanent among the working-class, and for this, according
to Townsend, the principle of population, especially active among the poor, provides.
"It seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident"
[i.e., so improvident as to be born without a silver spoon in the mouth], "that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community.
The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are
not only relieved from drudgery ... but are left at liberty without interruption to
pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions ... it [the Poor
Law] tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order of that system
which God and Nature have established in the world. [27] If the Venetian monk found in the fatal destiny that makes misery eternal, the raison d'être of Christian charity, celibacy, monasteries and holy houses, the Protestant prebendary
finds in it a pretext for condemning the laws in virtue of which the poor possessed
a right to a miserable public relief.

"The progress of social wealth," says Storch, "begets this useful class of society
... which performs the most wearisome, the vilest, the most disgusting functions,
which takes, in a word, on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life,
and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity of mind and conventional [c'est
bon!] dignity of character." [28] Storch asks himself in what then really consists the progress of this capitalistic
civilisation with its misery and its degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism.
He finds but one answer: security!

"Thanks to the advance of industry and science," says Sismondi, "every labourer can
produce every day much more than his consumption requires. But at the same time, whilst
his labour produces wealth, that wealth would, were he called on to consume it himself,
make him less fit for labour." According to him, "men" [i.e., non-workers] "would probably prefer to do without all artistic perfection, and
all the enjoyments that manufacturers procure for us, if it were necessary that all
should buy them by constant toil like that of the labourer.... Exertion to-day is
separated from its recompense; it is not the same man that first works, and then reposes;
but it is because the one works that the other rests.... The indefinite multiplication
of the productive powers of labour can then only have for result the increase of luxury
and enjoyment of the idle rich." [29]

Finally Destutt de Tracy, the fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire, blurts out brutally:
"In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor."
[30]

SECTION 5. ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALIST ACCUMULATION

A. England from 1846-1866

No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation
as the period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had found Fortunatus'
purse. But of all countries England again furnishes the classical example, because
it holds the foremost place in the world-market, because capitalist production is
here alone completely developed, and lastly, because the introduction of the Free-trade
millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economy. The titanic
advance of production — the latter half of the 20 years' period again far surpassing
the former — has been already pointed out sufficiently in Part IV.

Although the absolute increase of the English population in the last half century
was very great, the relative increase or rate of growth fell constantly, as the following
table borrowed from the census shows.

Annual increase per cent. of the population of England and Wales in decimal numbers:

1811-1821

1.533 per cent.

1821-1831

1.446 per cent.

1831-1841

1.326 per cent.

1841-1851

1.216 per cent.

1851-1861

1.141 per cent.

Let us now, on the other hand, consider the increase of wealth. Here the movement
of profit, rent of land, &c., that come under the income tax. furnishes the surest
basis. The increase of profits liable to income tax (farmers and some other categories
not included) in Great Britain from 1853 to 1864 amounted to 50.47% or 4.58% as the
annual average, [31] that of the population during the same period to about 12%. The augmentation of the
rent of land subject to taxation (including houses, railways, mines, fisheries, &c.),
amounted for 1853 to 1864 to 38% or 3 5/12% annually. Under this head the following
categories show the greatest increase:

Excess of annual income of 1864 over that of 1853

Increase per year

Houses

38.60%

3.50%

Quarries

84.76%

7.70%

Mines

68.85%

6.26%

Ironworks

39.92%

3.63%

Fisheries

57.37%

5.21%

Gasworks

126.02%

11.45%

Railways

83.29%

7.57%

If we compare the years from 1853 to 1864 in three sets of four consecutive years
each, the rate of augmentation of the income increases constantly. [32] It is, e.g., for that arising from profits between 1853 to 1857, 1.73% yearly; 1857-1861, 2.74%,
and for 1861-64, 9.30% yearly. The sum of the incomes of the United Kingdom that come
under the income tax was in 1856, £307,068,898; in 1859, £328,127,416; in 1862. £351,745,241;
in 1863, £359,142,897; in 1864, £362,462,279; in 1865, £385,530,020. [33]

The accumulation of capital was attended at the same time by its concentration and
centralisation. Although no official statistics of agriculture existed for England
(they did for Ireland), they were voluntarily given in 10 counties. These statistics
gave the result that from 1851 to 1861 the number of farms of less than 100 acres
had fallen from 31,583 to 26,597, so that 5,016 had been thrown together into larger
farms. [34] From 1815 to 1825 no personal estate of more than £1,000,000 came under the succession
duty; from 1825 to 1855, however, 8 did; and 4 from 1856 to June, 1859, i.e., in 4 1/2 years. [35] The centralisation will, however, be best seen from a short analysis of the Income
Tax Schedule D (profits, exclusive of farms, &c.), in the years 1864 and 1865. I note
beforehand that incomes from this source pay income tax on everything over £60. These
incomes liable to taxation in England, Wales and Scotland, amounted in 1864 to £95,844,222.
in 1865 to £105,435,579. [36] The number of persons taxed were in 1864, 308,416, out of a population of 23,891,009;
in 1865, 332,431 out of a population of 24,127,003. The following table shows the
distribution of these incomes in the two years:

Year ending April 5th, 1864.

Year ending April 5th, 1865.

Income from Profits

Income from People

Income from Profits

Income from People

Total Income

£95,844,222

308,416

105,435,738

332,431

of these

57,028,289

23,334

64,554,297

24,265

of these

36,415,225

3,619

42,535,576

4,021

of these

22,809,781

832

27,555,313

973

of these

8,744,762

91

11,077,238

107

In 1855 there were produced in the United Kingdom 61,453,079 tons of coal, of value
£16,113,167; in 1864, 92,787,873 tons, of value £23,197,968; in 1855, 3,218,154 tons
of pig-iron, of value £8,045,385; 1864, 4,767,951 tons, of value £11,919,877. In 1854
the length of the railroads worked in the United Kingdom was 8,054 miles, with a paid-up
capital of £286,068,794; in 1864 the length was 12,789 miles, with capital paid up
of £425,719,613. In 1854 the total sum of the exports and imports of the United Kingdom
was £268,210,145; in 1865, £489,923,285. The following table shows the movement of
the exports:

After these few examples one understands the cry of triumph of the Registrar-General
of the British people: "Rapidly as the population has increased, it has not kept pace
with the progress of industry and wealth." [38]

Let us turn now to the direct agents of this industry, or the producers of this wealth,
to the working-class. "It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state
of this country," says Gladstone, "that while there was a decrease in the consuming
powers of the people, and while there was an increase in the privations and distress
of the labouring class and operatives, there was at the same time a constant accumulation
of wealth in the upper classes, and a constant increase of capital." [39] Thus spake this unctuous minister in the House of Commons of February 13th, 1843.
On April 16th, 1863, 20 years later, in the speech in which he introduced his Budget:
"From 1842 to 1852 the taxable income of the country increased by 6 per cent.... In
the 8 years from 1853 to 1861 it had increased from the basis taken in 1853 by 20
per cent.! The fact is so astonishing as to he almost incredible ... this intoxicating
augmentation of wealth and power ... entirely confined to classes of property ...
must be of indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been
growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes
of poverty are less, I do not presume to say." [40] How lame an anti-climax! If the working-class has remained "poor," only "less poor"
in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class "an intoxicating augmentation of
wealth and power," then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of
poverty have not lessened, they have increased, because the extremes of wealth have.
As to the cheapening of the means of subsistence, the official statistics, e.g., the accounts of the London Orphan Asylum, show an increase in price of 20% for the
average of the three years 1860-1862, compared with 1851-1853. In the following three
years, 1863-1865, there was a progressive rise in the price of meat, butter, milk,
sugar. salt, coals, and a number of other necessary means of subsistence. [41] Gladstone's next Budget speech of April 7th, 1864, is a Pindaric dithyrambus on the
advance of surplus-value-making and the happiness of the people "tempered by poverty."
He speaks of masses "on the border" of pauperism, of branches of trade in which "wages
have not increased," and finally sums up the happiness of the working-class in the
words: "human life is but, in nine cases out of ten, a struggle for existence." [42] Professor Fawcett, not bound like Gladstone by official considerations, declares roundly: "I do not,
of course, deny that money wages have been augmented by this increase of capital (in
the last ten years), but this apparent advantage is to a great extent lost, because
many of the necessaries of life are becoming dearer" (he believes because of the fall
in value of the precious metals)..."the rich grow rapidly richer, whilst there is
no perceptible advance in the comfort enjoyed by the industrial classes.... They (the
labourers) become almost the slaves of the tradesman, to whom they owe money." [43]

In the chapters on the "working-day" and "machinery," the reader has seen under what
circumstances the British working-class created an "intoxicating augmentation of wealth
and power" for the propertied classes. There we were chiefly concerned with the social
functioning of the labourer. But for a full elucidation of the law of accumulation,
his condition outside the workshop must also be looked at, his condition as to food
and dwelling. The limits of this book compel us to concern ourselves chiefly with
the worst paid part of the industrial proletariat, and with the agricultural labourers,
who together form the majority of the working-class.

But first, one word on official pauperism, or on that part of the working-class which
has forfeited its condition of existence (the sale of labour-power), and vegetates
upon public alms. The official list of paupers numbered in England [44] 851,369 persons; in 1856, 877,767; in 1865, 971,433. In consequence of the cotton
famine, it grew in the years 1863 and 1864 to 1,079,382 and 1,014,978. The crisis
of 1866, which fell most heavily on London, created in this centre of the world-market,
more populous than the kingdom of Scotland, an increase of pauperism for the year
1866 of 19.5% compared with 1865, and of 24.4% compared with 1864, and a still greater
increase for the first months of 1867 as compared with 1866. From the analysis of
the statistics of pauperism, two points are to be taken. On the one hand, the fluctuation
up and down of the number of paupers, reflects the periodic changes of the industrial
cycle. On the other, the official statistics become more and more the working-men,
develop. E.g., the same transient canting outcries of "sensational literature." But frightful
increase of "deaths by starvation" in London during the last ten years proves beyond
doubt the growing horror in which the working-people hold the slavery of the workhouse,
that place of punishment for misery. [45]

B. The Badly Paid Strata of the British Industrial Class

During the cotton famine of 1862, Dr. Smith was charged by the Privy Council with
an inquiry into the conditions of nourishment of the distressed operatives in Lancashire
and Cheshire. His observations during many preceding years had led him to the conclusion
that "to avert starvation diseases," the daily food of an average woman ought to contain
at least 3,900 grains of carbon with 180 grains of nitrogen; the daily food of an
average man, at least 4,300 grains of carbon with 200 grains of nitrogen; for women,
about the same quantity of nutritive elements as are contained in 2 lbs. of good wheaten
bread, for men 1/9 more; for the weekly average of adult men and women, at least 28,600
grains of carbon and 1,330 grains of nitrogen. His calculation was practically confirmed
in a surprising manner by its agreement with the miserable quantity of nourishment
to which want had forced down the consumption of the cotton operatives. This was,
in December, 1862, 29,211 grains of carbon, and 1,295 grains of nitrogen weekly.

In the year 1863, the Privy Council ordered an inquiry into the state of distress
of the worst-nourished part of the English working-class. Dr. Simon, medical officer
to the Privy Council, chose for this work the above-mentioned Dr. Smith. His inquiry
ranges on the one hand over the agricultural labourers, on the other, over silk-weavers,
needlewomen, kid-glovers, stocking-weavers, glove-weavers, and shoemakers. The latter
categories are, with the exception of the stocking-weavers, exclusively town-dwellers.
It was made a rule in the inquiry to select in each category the most healthy families,
and those comparatively in the best circumstances.

As a general result it was found that "in only one of the examined classes of in-door
operatives did the average nitrogen-supply just exceed, while in another it nearly
reached, the estimated standard of bare sufficiency [i.e., sufficient to avert starvation diseases], and that in two classes there was defect
— in one, a very large defect — of both nitrogen and carbon. Moreover, as regards
the examined families of the agricultural population, it appeared that more than a
fifth were with less than the estimated sufficiency of carbonaceous food, that more
than one-third were with less than the estimated sufficiency of nitrogenous food,
and that in three counties (Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire), insufficiency
of nitrogenous food was the average local diet." [46] Among the agricultural labourers, those of England, the wealthiest part of the United
Kingdom, were the worst fed. [47] The insufficiency of food among the agricultural labourers, fell, as a rule, chiefly
on the women and children, for "the man must eat to do his work." Still greater penury
ravaged the town-workers examined. "They are so ill fed that assuredly among them
there must be many cases of severe and injurious privation." [48] ("Privation" of the capitalist all this! i.e., "abstinence" from paying for the means of subsistence absolutely necessary for
the mere vegetation of his "hands.")

The following table shows the conditions of nourishment of the above-named categories
of purely town-dwelling work-people, as compared with the minimum assumed by Dr. Smith,
and with the food-allowance of the cotton operatives during the time of their greatest
distress:

Both Sexes

Average weekly carbon

Average weekly nitrogen

Five in-door occupations

28,876 grains

1,192 grains

Unemployed Lancashire Operatives

28,211 grains

1,295 grains

Minimum quantity to be allowed to the Lancashire Operatives, equal number of males and females

28,600 grains

1,330 grains

One half, or 60/125, of the industrial labour categories investigated, had absolutely
no beer, 28% no milk. The weekly average of the liquid means of nourishment in the
families varied from seven ounces in the needle-women to 24 3/4 ounces in the stocking-makers.
The majority of those who did not obtain milk were needle-women in London. The quantity
of bread-stuffs consumed weekly varied from 7 3/4 lbs. for the needle-women to 11 1/2 lbs. for the shoemakers, and gave a total average of 9.9
lbs. per adult weekly. Sugar (treacle, etc.) varied from 4 ounces weekly for the kid-glovers
to 11 ounces for the stockingmakers; and the total average per week for all categories
was 8 ounces per adult weekly. Total weekly average of butter (fat, etc.) 5 ounces
per adult. The weekly average of meat (bacon, etc.) varied from 7 1/4 ounces for the
silk-weavers, to 18 1/4 ounces for the kid-glovers; total average for the different
categories 13.6 ounces. The weekly cost of food per adult, gave the following average
figures; silk-weavers 2s. 2 1/2d., needle-women 2s. 7d., kid-glovers 2s. 9 1/2d.,
shoemakers 2s 7 3/4d., stocking-weavers 2s. 6 1/4d. For the silk-weavers of Macclesfield
the average was only 1s. 8 1/2d. The worst categories were the needle-women, silk-weavers
and kid-glovers. [50] Of these facts, Dr. Simon in his General Health Report says: "That cases are innumerable
in which defective diet is the cause or the aggravator of disease, can be affirmed
by any one who is conversant with poor law medical practice, or with the wards and
out-patient rooms of hospitals.... Yet in this point of view, there is, in my opinion,
a very important sanitary context to be added. It must be remembered that privation
of food is very reluctantly borne, and that as a rule great poorness of diet will
only come when other privations have preceded it. Long before insufficiency of diet
is a matter of hygienic concern, long before the physiologist would think of counting
the grains of nitrogen and carbon which intervene between life and starvation, the
household will have been utterly destitute of material comfort; clothing and fuel
will have been even scantier than food — against inclemencies of weather there will
have been no adequate protection — dwelling space will have been stinted to the degree
in which over-crowding produces or increases disease; of household utensils and furniture
there will have been scarcely any-even cleanliness will have been found costly or
difficult, and if there still be self-respectful endeavours to maintain it, every
such endeavour will represent additional pangs of hunger. The home, too, will be where
shelter can be cheapest bought; in quarters where commonly there is least fruit of
sanitary supervision, least drainage, least scavenging, least suppression of public
nuisances, least or worst water supply, and, if in town, least light and air. Such are the sanitary dangers to which poverty is almost certainly exposed, when it
is poverty enough to imply scantiness of food. And while the sum of them is of terrible
magnitude against life, the mere scantiness of food is in itself of very serious moment....
These are painful reflections, especially when it is remembered that the poverty to
which they advert is not the deserved poverty of idleness. In all cases it is the
poverty of working populations. Indeed, as regards the in-door operatives, the work
which obtains the scanty pittance of food, is for the most part excessively prolonged.
Yet evidently it is only in a qualified sense that the work can be deemed self-supporting....
And on a very large scale the nominal self-support can be only a circuit, longer or
shorter, to pauperism." [51]

The intimate connexion between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers
of the working-class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich,
for which capitalist accumulation is the basis, reveals itself only when the economic
laws are known. It is otherwise with the "housing of the poor." Every unprejudiced
observer sees that the greater the centralisation of the means of production, the
greater is the corresponding heaping together of the labourers, within a given space;
that therefore the swifter capitalistic accumulation, the more miserable are the dwellings
of the working-people. "Improvements" of towns, accompanying the increase of wealth,
by the demolition of badly built quarters, the erection of palaces for banks, warehouses,
&c., the widening of streets for business traffic, for the carriages of luxury, and
for the introduction of tramways, &c., drive away the poor into even worse and more
crowded hiding places. On the other hand, every one knows that the dearness of dwellings
is in inverse ratio to their excellence, and that the mines of misery are exploited
by house speculators with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi.
The antagonistic character of capitalist accumulation, and therefore of the capitalistic
relations of property generally, [52] is here so evident, that even the official English reports on this subject teem with
heterodox onslaughts on "property and its rights." With the development of industry,
with the accumulation of capital, with the growth and "improvement" of towns, the
evil makes such progress that the mere fear of contagious diseases which do not spare
even "respectability," brought into existence from 1847 to 1864 no less than 10 Acts
of Parliament on sanitation, and that the frightened bourgeois in some towns, as Liverpool,
Glasgow, &c., took strenuous measures through their municipalities. Nevertheless Dr.
Simon, in his report of 1865, says: "Speaking generally, it may be said that the evils
are uncontrolled in England." By order of the Privy Council, in 1864, an inquiry was
made into the conditions of the housing of the agricultural labourers, in 1865 of
the poorer classes in the towns. The results of the admirable work of Dr. Julian Hunter
are to be found in the seventh (1865) and eighth (1866) exports on "Public Health."
To the agricultural labourers, I shall come later. On the condition of town dwellings,
I quote, as preliminary, a general remark of Dr. Simon. "Although my official point
of view," he says, "is one exclusively physical, common humanity requires that the
other aspect of this evil should not be ignored .... In its higher degrees it [i.e., over-crowding] almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such
unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual
nakedness, as is rather bestial than human. To be subject to these influences is a
degradation which must become deeper and deeper for those on whom it continues to
work. To children who are born under its curse, it must often be a very baptism into
infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced
should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilisation which has
its essence in physical and moral cleanliness." [53]

London takes the first place in over-crowded habitations, absolutely unfit for human
beings. "He feels clear," says Dr. Hunter, "on two points; first, that there are about
20 large colonies in London, of about 10,000 persons each, whose miserable condition
exceeds almost anything he has seen elsewhere in England, and is almost entirely the
result of their bad house accommodation; and second, that the crowded and dilapidated
condition of the houses of these colonies is much worse than was the case 20 years
ago." [54] "It is not too much to say that life in parts of London and Newcastle is infernal."
[55]

Further, the better-off part of the working-class, together with the small shopkeepers
and other elements of the lower middle class, falls in London more and more under
the curse of these vile conditions of dwelling, in proportion as "improvements," and
with them the demolition of old streets and houses, advance, as factories and the
afflux of human beings grow in the metropolis, and finally as house rents rise with
the ground-rents. "Rents have become so heavy that few labouring men can afford more
than one room." [56] There is almost no house-property in London that is not overburdened with a number
of middlemen. For the price of land in London is always very high in comparison with
its yearly revenue, and therefore every buyer speculates on getting rid of it again
at a jury price (the expropriation valuation fixed by jurymen), or on pocketing an
extraordinary increase of value arising from the neighbourhood of some large establishment.
As a consequence of this there is a regular trade in the purchase of "fag-ends of
leases." "Gentlemen in this business may be fairly expected to do as they do — get
all they can from the tenants while they have them, and leave as little as they can
for their successors." [57]

The rents are weekly, and these gentlemen run no risk. In consequence of the making
of railroads in the City, "the spectacle has lately been seen in the East of London
of a number of families wandering about some Saturday night with their scanty worldly
goods on their backs, without any resting place but the workhouse." [58] The workhouses are already over-crowded. and the "improvements" already sanctioned
by Parliament are only just begun. If labourers are driven away by the demolition
of their old houses, they do not leave their old parish, or at most they settle down
on its borders, as near as they can get to it. "They try, of course, to remain as
near as possible to their workshops. The inhabitants do not go beyond the same or
the next parish, parting their two-room tenements into single rooms, and crowding
even those.... Even at an advanced rent, the people who are displaced will hardly
be able to get an accommodation so good as the meagre one they have left.... Half
the workmen ... of the Strand ... walked two miles to their work." [59] This same Strand, a main thoroughfare which gives strangers an imposing idea of the
wealth of London, may serve as an example of the packing together of human beings
in that town. In one of its parishes, the Officer of Health reckoned 581 persons per
acre, although half the width of the Thames was reckoned in. It will be self-understood
that every sanitary measure, which, as has been the case hitherto in London, hunts
the labourers from one quarter, by demolishing uninhabitable houses, serves only to
crowd them together yet more closely in another. "Either," says Dr. Hunter, "the whole
proceeding will of necessity stop as an absurdity, or the public compassion (!) be
effectually aroused to the obligation which may now be without exaggeration called
national, of supplying cover to those who by reason of their having no capital, cannot
provide it for themselves, though they can by periodical payments reward those who,
will provide it for them." [60] Admire this capitalistic justice! The owner, of land, of houses, the businessman,
when expropriated by "improvements" such as railroads, the building of new streets,
&c., not only receives full indemnity. He must, according to law, human and divine,
be comforted for his enforced "abstinence" over and above this by a thumping profit.
The labourer, with his wife and child and chattels, is thrown out into the street,
and — if he crowds in too large numbers towards quarters of the town where the vestries
insist on decency, he is prosecuted in the name of sanitation!

Except London, there was at the beginning of the 19th century no single town in England
of 100,000 inhabitants. Only five had more than 50,000. Now there are 28 towns with
more than 50,000 inhabitants. "The result of this change is not only that the class
of town people is enormously increased, but the old close-packed little towns are
now centres, built round on every side, open nowhere to air, and being no longer agreeable
to the rich are abandoned by them for the pleasanter outskirts. The successors of
these rich are occupying the larger houses at the rate of a family to each room [...
and find accommodation for two or three lodgers ...] and a population, for which the
houses were not intended and quite unfit, has been created, whose surroundings are
truly degrading to the adults and ruinous to the children." [61] The more rapidly capital accumulates in an industrial or commercial town, the more
rapidly flows the stream of exploitable human material, the more miserable are the
improvised dwellings of the labourers.

Newcastle-on-Tyne, as the centre of a coal and iron district of growing productiveness,
takes the next place after London in the housing inferno. Not less than 34,000 persons
live there in single rooms. Because of their absolute danger to the community, houses
in great numbers have lately been destroyed by the authorities in Newcastle and Gateshead.
The building of new houses progresses very slowly, business very quickly. The town
was, therefore, in 1865, more full than ever. Scarcely a room was to let. Dr. Embleton,
of the Newcastle Fever Hospital, says: "There can be little doubt that the great cause
of the continuance and spread of the typhus has been the over-crowding of human beings,
and the uncleanliness of their dwellings. The rooms, in which labourers in many cases live, are situated in confined and unwholesome
yards or courts, and for space, light, air, and cleanliness, are models of insufficiency
and insalubrity, and a disgrace to any civilised community; in them men, women, and
children lie at night huddled together: and as regards the men, the night-shift succeed
the day-shift, and the day-shift the night-shift in unbroken series for some time
together, the beds having scarcely time to cool; the whole house badly supplied with
water and worse with privies; dirty, unventilated, and pestiferous." [62] The price per week of such lodgings ranges from 8d. to 3s. "The town of Newcastle-on-Tyne,"
says Dr. Hunter, "contains a sample of the finest tribe of our countrymen, often sunk
by external circumstances of house and street into an almost savage degradation."
[63]

As a result of the ebbing and flowing of capital and labour, the state of the dwellings
of an industrial town may to-day be bearable, tomorrow hideous. Or the aedileship
of the town may have pulled itself together for the removal of the most shocking abuses.
To-morrow, like a swarm of locusts, come crowding in masses of ragged Irishmen or
decayed English agricultural labourers. They are stowed away in cellars and lofts, or the hitherto respectable
labourer's dwelling is transformed into a lodging-house whose personnel changes as quickly as the billets in the 30 years' war. Example: Bradford (Yorkshire).
There the municipal philistine was just busied with urban improvements. Besides, there
were still in Bradford, in 1861, 1,751 uninhabited houses. But now comes that revival
of trade which the mildly liberal Mr. Forster, the negro's friend, recently crowed
over with so much grace. With the revival of trade came of course an overflow from
the waves of the ever fluctuating "reserve army" or "relative surplus-population."
The frightful cellar habitations and rooms registered in the list, [64] which Dr. Hunter obtained from the agent of an Insurance Company, were for the most
part inhabited by well-paid labourers. They declared that they would willingly pay
for better dwellings if they were to be had. Meanwhile, they become degraded, they
fall ill, one and all, whilst the mildly liberal Forster, M. P., sheds tears over
the blessings of Free-trade, and the profits of the eminent men of Bradford who deal
in worsted. In the Report of September, 1865, Dr. Bell, one of the poor law doctors
of Bradford, ascribes the frightful mortality of fever-patients in his district to
the nature of their dwellings. "In one small cellar measuring 1,500 cubic feet ...
there are ten persons .... Vincent Street, Green Aire Place, and the Leys include
223 houses having 1,450 inhabitants, 435 beds, and 36 privies.... The beds-and in that term I include any roll of dirty old rags, or an armful of shavings-have
an average of 3.3 persons to each, many have 5 and 6 persons to each, and some people,
I am told, are absolutely without beds; they sleep in their ordinary clothes, on the
bare boards — young men and women, married and unmarried, all together. I need scarcely
add that many of these dwellings are dark, damp, dirty, stinking holes, utterly unfit
for human habitations; they are the centres from which disease and death are distributed
amongst those in better circumstances, who have allowed them thus to fester in our
midst." [65]

Bristol takes the third place after London in the misery of its dwellings. "Bristol,
where the blankest poverty and domestic misery abound in the wealthiest town of Europe."
[66]

C. The Nomad Population

We turn now to a class of people whose origin is agricultural, but whose occupation
is in great part industrial. They are the light infantry of capital, thrown by it,
according to its needs, now to this point, now to that. When they are not on the march,
they "camp." Nomad labour is used for various operations of building and draining,
brick-making, lime-burning, railway-making, &c. A flying column of pestilence, it
carries into the places in whose neighbourhood it pitches its camp, small-pox, typhus,
cholera, scarlet fever, &c. [67] In undertakings that involve much capital outlay, such as railways, &c., the contractor
himself generally provides his army with wooden huts and the like, thus improvising
villages without any sanitary provisions, outside the control of the local boards,
very profitable to the contractor, who exploits the labourers in two-fold fashion
— as soldiers of industry and as tenants. According as the wooden hut contains 1,
2, or 3 holes, its inhabitant, navvy, or whatever he may be, has to pay 1, 3, or 4
shillings weekly. [68] One example will suffice. In September, 1864, Dr. Simon reports that the Chairman
of the Nuisances Removal Committee of the parish of Sevenoaks sent the following denunciation
to Sir George Grey, Home Secretary: — "Small-pox cases were rarely heard of in this
parish until about twelve months ago. Shortly before that time, the works for a railway
from Lewisham to Tunbridge were commenced here, and, in addition to the principal
works being in the immediate neighbourhood of this town, here was also established
the depôt for the whole of the works, so that a large number of persons was of necessity
employed here. As cottage accommodation could not be obtained for them all, huts were
built in several places along the line of the works by the contractor, Mr. Jay, for
their especial occupation. These huts possessed no ventilation nor drainage, and,
besides, were necessarily over-crowded, because each occupant had to accommodate lodgers,
whatever the number in his own family might be, although there were only two rooms
to each tenement. The consequences were, according to the medical report we received,
that in the night-time these poor people were compelled to endure all the horror of
suffocation to avoid the pestiferous smells arising from the filthy, stagnant water,
and the privies close under their windows. Complaints were at length made to the Nuisances
Removal Committee by a medical gentleman who had occasion to visit these huts, and
he spoke of their condition as dwellings in the most severe terms, and he expressed
his fears that some very serious consequences might ensue, unless some sanitary measures
were adopted. About a year ago, Mr. Jay promised to appropriate a hut, to which persons
in his employ, who were suffering from contagious diseases, might at once be removed.
He repeated that promise on the 23rd July last, but although since the date of the
last Promise there have been several cases of small-pox in his huts, and two deaths
from the same disease, yet he has taken no steps whatever to carry out his promise.
On the 9th September instant, Mr. Kelson, surgeon, reported to me further cases of
small-pox in the same huts, and he described their condition as most disgraceful.
I should add, for your (the Home Secretary's) information that an isolated house, called the Pest-house,
which is set apart for parishioners who might be suffering from infectious diseases,
has been continually occupied by such patients for many months past, and is also now
occupied; that in one family five children died from small-pox and fever; that from
the 1st April to the 1st September this year, a period of five months, there have
been no fewer than ten deaths from small-pox in the parish, four of them being in
the huts already referred to; that it is impossible to ascertain the exact number
of persons who have suffered from that disease although they are known to be many,
from the fact of the families keeping it as private as possible." [69]

The labourers in coal and other mines belong to the best paid categories of the British
proletariat. The price at which they buy their wages was shown on an earlier page.
[70] Here I merely cast a hurried glance over the conditions of their dwellings. As a
rule, the exploiter of a mine, whether its owner or his tenant, builds a number of
cottages for his hands. They receive cottages and coal for firing "for nothing" —
i.e., these form part of their wages, paid in kind. Those who are not lodged in this
way receive in compensation £4 per annum. The mining districts attract with rapidity
a large population, made up of the miners themselves, and the artisans, shopkeepers,
&c., that group themselves around them. The ground-rents are high, as they are generally
where population is dense. The master tries, therefore, to run up, within the smallest
space possible at the mouth of the pit, just so many cottages as are necessary to
pack together his hands and their families. If new mines are opened in the neighborhood,
or old ones are again set working, the pressure increases. In the construction of the cottages, only one point of view is of moment, the "abstinence"
of the capitalist front all expenditure that is not absolutely unavoidable. "The lodging
which is obtained by the pitman and other labourers connected with the collieries
of Northumberland and Durham," says Dr. Julian Hunter, "is perhaps, on the whole,
the worst and the dearest of which any large specimens can be found in England, the
similar parishes of Monmouthshire excepted.... The extreme badness is in the high
number of men found in one room, in the smallness of the ground-plot on which a great
number of houses are thrust, the want of water, the absence of privies, and the frequent
placing of one house on the top of another, or distribution into flats, ... the lessee
acts as if the whole colony were encamped, not resident." [71]

"In pursuance of my instructions," says Dr. Stevens, "I visited most of the large
colliery villages in the Durham Union.... With very few exceptions, the general statement
that no means are taken to secure the health of the inhabitants would be true of all
of them.... All colliers are bound ['bound,' an expression which, like bondage, dates
from the age of serfdom] to the colliery lessee or owner for twelve months.... If
the colliers express discontent, or in any way annoy the 'viewer,' a mark of memorandum
is made against their names, and, at the annual 'binding,' such men are turned off...
It appears to me that no part of the 'truck system' could be worse than what obtains
in these densely-populated districts. The collier is bound to take as part of his
hiring a house surrounded with pestiferous influences; he cannot help himself, and
it appears doubtful whether anyone else can help him except his proprietor (he is,
to all intents and purposes, a serf), and his proprietor first consults his balance-sheet,
and the result is tolerably certain. The collier is also often supplied with water
by the proprietor, which, whether it be good or bad, he has to pay for, or rather
he suffers a deduction for from his wages." [72]

In conflict with "public opinion," or even with the Officers of Health, capital makes
no difficulty about "justifying" the conditions partly dangerous, partly degrading,
to which it confines the working and domestic life of the labourer, on the ground
that they are necessary for profit. It is the same thing when capital "abstains" from
protective measures against dangerous machinery in the factory, from appliances for
ventilation and for safety in mines, &c. It is the same here with the housing of the
miners. Dr. Simon, medical officer of the Privy Council, in his official Report says:
"In apology for the wretched household accommodation ... it is alleged that miners
are commonly worked on lease; that the duration of the lessee's interest (which in
collieries is commonly for 21 years), is not so long that he should deem it worth
his while to create good accommodation for his labourers, and for the tradespeople
and others whom the work attracts; that even if he were disposed to act liberally
in the matter, this disposition would commonly be defeated by his landlord's tendency
to fix on him, as ground-rent, an exorbitant additional charge for the privilege of
having on the surface of the ground the decent and comfortable village which the labourers
of the subterranean property ought to inhabit, and that prohibitory price (if not
actual prohibition) equally excludes others who might desire to build. It would be
foreign to the purpose of this report to enter upon any discussion of the merits of
the above apology. Nor here is it even needful to consider where it would be that,
if decent accommodation were provided, the cost ... would eventually fall — whether
on landlord, or lessee, or labourer, or public. But in presence of such shameful facts
as are vouched for in the annexed reports [those of Dr. Hunter, Dr. Stevens, &c.]
a remedy may well be claimed.... Claims of landlordship are being so used as to do great public wrong. The landlord
in his capacity of mine-owner invites an industrial colony to labour on his estate,
and then in his capacity of surface-owner makes it impossible that the labourers whom
he collects, should find proper lodging where they must live. The lessee [the capitalist
exploiter] meanwhile has no pecuniary motive for resisting that division of the bargain;
well knowing that if its latter conditions be exorbitant, the consequences fall, not
on him, that his labourers on whom they fall have not education enough to know the
value of their sanitary rights, that neither obscenest lodging nor foulest drinking
water will be appreciable inducements towards a 'strike.'" [73]

D. Effect of Crises on the Best Paid Part of the Working-Class

Before I turn to the regular agricultural labourers, I may be allowed to show, by
one example, how industrial revulsions affect even the bestpaid, the aristocracy,
of the working-class. It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the
great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically ends. The next termination
of the cycle was due in 1866. Already discounted in the regular factory districts
by the cotton famine, which threw much capital from its wonted sphere into the great
centres of the money-market, the crisis assumed, at this time, an especially financial
character. Its outbreak in 1866 was signalised by the failure of a gigantic London
Bank, immediately followed by the collapse of countless swidling companies. One of
the great London branches of industry involved in the catastrophe was iron shipbuilding.
The magnates of this trade had not only over-produced beyond all measure during the
overtrading time, but they had, besides, engaged in enormous contracts on the speculation
that credit would be forthcoming to an equivalent extent. Now, a terrible reaction
set in, that even at this hour (the end of March, 1867) continues in this and other
London industries. [74] To show the condition of the labourers, I quote the following from the circumstantial
report of a correspondent of the Morning Star, who, at the end of 1866, and beginning of 1867, visited the chief centres of distress:
"In the East End districts of Poplar, Millwall, Greenwich, Deptford, Limehouse and
Canning Town, at least 15,000 workmen and their families were in a state of utter
destitution, and 3,000 skilled mechanics were breaking stones in the workhouse yard
(after distress of over half a year's duration).... I had great difficulty in reaching
the workhouse door, for a hungry crowd besieged it.... They were waiting for their
tickets, but the time had not yet arrived for the distribution. The yard was a great
square place with an open shed running all round it, and several large heaps of snow
covered the paving-stones in the middle. In the middle, also, were little wicker-fenced
spaces, like sheep pens, where in finer weather the men worked; but on the day of
my visit the pens were so snowed up that nobody could sit in them. Men were busy,
however, in the open shed breaking paving-stones into macadam. Each man had a big
paving-stone for a seat, and he chipped away at the rime-covered granite with a big
hammer until he had broken up, and think! five bushels of it, and then he had done
his day's work, and got his day's pay — threepence and an allowance of food. In another
part of the yard was a rickety little wooden house, and when we opened the door of
it, we found it filled with men who were huddled together shoulder to shoulder for
the warmth of one another's bodies and breath. They were picking oakum and disputing
the while as to which could work the longest on a given quantity of food — for endurance
was the point of honour. Seven thousand ... in this one workhouse ... were recipients
of relief ... many hundreds of them ... it appeared, were, six or eight months ago,
earning the highest wages paid to artisans.... Their number would be more than doubled
by the count of those who, having exhausted all their savings, still refuse to apply
to the parish, because they have a little left to pawn. Leaving the workhouse, I took
a walk through the streets, mostly of little one-storey houses, that abound in the
neighbourhood of Poplar. My guide was a member of the Committee of the Unemployed....
My first call was on an ironworker who had been seven and twenty weeks out of employment.
I found the man with his family sitting in a little back room. The room was not bare
of furniture, and there was a fire in it. This was necessary to keep the naked feet
of the young children from getting frost bitten, for it was a bitterly cold day. On
a tray in front of the fire lay a quantity of oakum, which the wife and children were
picking in return for their allowance from the parish. The man worked in the stone
yard of the workhouse for a certain ration of food, and threepence per day. He had
now come home to dinner quite hungry, as he told us with a melancholy smile, and his
dinner consisted of a couple of slices of bread and dripping, and a cup of milkless
tea.... The next door at which we knocked was opened by a middle-aged woman, who,
without saying a word, led us into a little back parlour, in which sat all her family,
silent and fixedly staring at a rapidly dying fire. Such desolation, such hopelessness
was about these people and their little room, as I should not care to witness again.
'Nothing have they done, sir,' said the woman, pointing to her boys, 'for six and
twenty weeks; and all our money gone — all the twenty pounds that me and father saved
when times were better, thinking it would yield a little to keep us when we got past
work. Look at it,' she said, almost fiercely, bringing out a bank-book with all its
well kept entries of money paid in, and money taken out, so that we could see how
the little fortune had begun with the first five shilling deposit, and had grown by
little and little to be twenty pounds, and how it had melted down again till the sum
in hand got from pounds to shillings, and the last entry made the book as worthless
as a blank sheet. This family received relief from the workhouse, and it furnished
them with just one scanty meal per day.... Our next visit was to an iron labourer's
wife, whose husband had worked in the yards. We found her ill from want of food, lying
on a mattress in her clothes, and just covered with a strip of carpet, for all the
bedding had been pawned. Two wretched children were tending her, themselves looking
as much in need of nursing as their mother. Nineteen weeks of enforced idleness had
brought them to this pass, and while the mother told the history of that bitter past,
she moaned as if all her faith in a future that should atone for it were dead....
On getting outside a young fellow came running after us, and asked us to step inside
his house and see if anything could be done for him. A young wife, two pretty children,
a cluster of pawn-tickets, and a bare room were all he had to show."

On the after pains of the crisis of 1866, the following extract from a Tory newspaper.
It must not be forgotten that the East-end of London, which is here dealt with, is
not only the seat of the iron shipbuilding mentioned above,. but also of a so-called
"home-industry" always underpaid. "A frightful spectacle was to be seen yesterday
in one part of the metropolis. Although the unemployed thousands of the East-end did
not parade with their black flags en masse, the human torrent was imposing enough. Let us remember what these people suffer.
They are dying of hunger. That is the simple and terrible fact. There are 40,000 of
them.... In our presence, in one quarter of this wonderful metropolis, are packed
— next door to the most enormous accumulation of wealth the world ever saw — cheek
by jowl with this are 40,000 helpless, starving people. These thousands are now breaking
in upon the other quarters; always half-starving, they cry their misery in our ears,
they cry to Heaven, they tell us from their miserable dwellings, that it is impossible
for them to find work, and useless for them to beg. The local ratepayers themselves
are driven by the parochial charges to the verge of pauperism." — (Standard, 5th April, 1867.)

As it is the fashion amongst English capitalists to quote Belgium as the Paradise
of the labourer because "freedom of labour," or what is the same thing, "freedom of
capital," is there limited neither by the despotism of Trades' Unions, nor by Factory
Acts, a word or two on the "happiness' of the Belgian labourer. Assuredly no one was
more thoroughly initiated in the mysteries of this happiness than the late M. Ducpétiaux,
inspector-general of Belgian prisons and charitable institutions, and member of the
central commission of Belgian statistics. Let us take his work: "Budgets économiques
des classes ouvrières de la Belgique," Bruxelles, 1855. Here we find among other matters,
a normal Belgian labourer's family, whose yearly income and expenditure he calculates
on very exact data, and whose conditions of nourishment are then compared with those
of the soldier, sailor, and prisoner. The family "consists of father, mother, and
four children." Of these 6 persons "four may be usefully employed the whole year through."
It is assumed that "there is no sick person nor one incapable of work, among them,"
nor are there "expenses for religious, moral, and intellectual purposes, except a
very small sum for church sittings," nor "contributions to savings banks or benefit
societies," nor "expenses due to luxury or the result of improvidence." The father
and eldest son, however, allow themselves "the use of tobacco," and on Sundays "go
to the cabaret," for which a whole 86 centimes a week are reckoned. "From a general compilation
of wages allowed to the labourers in different trades, it follows that the highest
average of daily wage is 1 franc 56c., for men, 89 centimes for women, 56 centimes
for boys, and 55 centimes for girls. Calculated at this rate, the resources of the
family would amount, at the maximum, to 1,068 francs a-year.... In the family ...
taken as typical we have calculated all possible resources. But in ascribing wages
to the mother of the family we raise the question of the direction of the household. How will its internal economy be cared for? Who will look after the young children?
Who will get ready the meals, do the washing and mending? This is the dilemma incessantly
presented to the labourers."

According to this the budget of the family is:

The father

300 working-days at fr. 1.56

fr. 468

mother

300 working-days at fr. 0.89

fr. 267

boy

300 working-days at fr. 0.56

fr. 168

girl

300 working-days at fr. 0.55

fr. 165

Total fr. 1,068

The annual expenditure of the family would cause a deficit upon the hypothesis that
the labourer has the food of:

The man-of-war's man

fr. 1,828

Deficit fr. 760

The soldier

fr. 1,473

Deficit fr. 405

The prisoner

fr. 1,112

Deficit fr. 44

"We see that few labouring families can reach, we will not say the average of the
sailor or soldier, but even that of the prisoner. 'The general average (of the cost
of each prisoner in the different prisons during the period 1847-1849), has been 63
centimes for all prisons. This figure, compared with that of the daily maintenance
of the labourer, shows a difference of 13 centimes. It must be remarked further, that
if in the prisons it is necessary to set down in the account the expenses of administration
and surveillance, on the other hand, the prisoners have not to pay for their lodging;
that the purchases they make at the canteens are not included in the expenses of maintenance,
and that these expenses are greatly lowered in consequence of the large number of
persons that make up the establishments, and of contracting for or buying wholesale,
the food and other things that enter into their consumption.... How comes it, however,
that a great number, we might say, a great majority, of labourers, live in a more
economical way? It is ... by adopting expedients, the secret of which only the labourer
knows;, by reducing his daily rations; by substituting rye-bread for wheat; by eating
less meat, or even none at all, and the same with butter and condiments; by contenting
themselves with one or two rooms where the family is crammed together, where boys
and girls sleep side by side, often on the same pallet; by economy of clothing, washing,
decency: by giving up the Sunday diversions; by, in short, resigning themselves to
the most painful privations. Once arrived at this extreme limit, the least rise in
the price of food, stoppage of work, illness, increases the labourer's distress and
determines his complete ruin; debts accumulate, credit fails, the most necessary clothes
and furniture are pawned, and finally, the family asks to be enrolled on the list
of paupers." (Ducpétiaux, l. c., pp. 151, 154, 155.) In fact, in this "Paradise of
capitalists" there follows, on the smallest change in the price of the most essential
means of subsistence, a change in the number of deaths and crimes! (See Manifesto
of the Maatschappij: "De Vlamingen Vooruit!" Brussels, 1860, pp. 15, 16.) In all Belgium
are 930,000 families, of whom, according to the official statistics, 90,000 are wealthy
and on the list of voters = 450,000 persons; 390,000 families of the lower middle-class
in towns and villages, the greater part of them constantly sinking into the proletariat,
= 1,950,000 persons, Finally, 450,000 working-class families = 2,250,000 persons,
of whom the model ones enjoy the happiness depicted by Ducpétiaux. Of the 450,000
working-class families, over 200,000 are on the pauper list.

E. The British Agricultural Proletariat

Nowhere does the antagonistic character of capitalistic product and accumulation assert
itself more brutally than in the progress of English agriculture (including cattle-breeding)
and the retrogression the English agricultural labourer. Before I turn to his present
situate a rapid retrospect. Modern agriculture dates in England from the middle of
the 18th century, although the revolution in landed property, from which the changed
mode of production starts as a basis, has a much earlier date.

If we take the statements of Arthur Young, a careful observer, though a superficial
thinker, as to the agricultural labourer of 1771, the latter plays a very pitiable
part compared with his predecessor of the end of the 14th century, "when the labourer
... could live in plenty, and accumulate wealth," [75] not to speak of the 15th century, "the golden age of the English labourer in town
and country." We need not, however, go back so far. In a very instructive work of
the year 1777 we read: "The great farmer is nearly mounted to a level with him [the
gentleman]; while the poor labourer is depressed almost to the earth. His unfortunate
situation will fully appear, by taking a comparative view of it, only forty years
ago, and at present.... Landlord and tenant ... have both gone hand in hand in keeping
the labourer down." [76] It is then proved in detail that the real agricultural wages between 1737 and 1777
fell nearly 1/4 or 25 per cent. "Modern policy," says Dr. Richard Price also, "is,
indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people; and the consequences may
in time prove that the whole kingdom will consist of only gentry and beggars, or of
grandees and slaves." [77]

Nevertheless, the position of the English agricultural labourer from 1770 to 1780,
with regard to his food and dwelling, as well as to his self-respect, amusements,
&c., is an ideal never attained again since that time. His average wage expressed
in pints of wheat was from 1770 to 1771, 90 pints, in Eden's time (1797) only 65,
in 1808 but 60. [78]

The state of the agricultural labourer at the end of the Anti-Jacobin War, during
which landed proprietors, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, bankers, stockbrokers,
army-contractors, &c., enriched themselves so extraordinarily, has been already indicated
above. The nominal wages rose in consequence partly of the bank-note depreciation,
partly of a rise in the price of the primary means of subsistence independent of this
depreciation.- But the actual wage-variation can be evidenced in a very simple way,
without entering into details that are here unnecessary. The Poor Law and its administration
were in 1795 and 1814 the same. It will be remembered how this law was carried out
in the country districts: in the form of alms the parish made up the nominal wage
to the nominal sum required for the simple vegetation of the labourer. The ratio between
the wages paid by the farmer, and the wage-deficit made good by the parish, shows
us two things. First, the falling of wages below their minimum; second, the degree
in which the agricultural labourer was a compound of wage-labourer and pauper, or
the degree in which he had been turned into a serf of his parish. Let us take one
county that represents the average condition of things in all counties. In Northamptonshire,
in 1795, the average weekly wage was 7s. 6d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of 6 persons, £36 12s. 5d.; their total income,
£29 18s.; deficit made good by the parish, £6 14s. 5d. In 1814, in the same county,
the weekly wage was 12s. 2d.; the total yearly expenditure of a family of 5 persons,
£54 18s. 4d.; their total income, £36, 2s.; deficit made good by the parish, £18 6s.
4d. [79] In 1795 the deficit was less than 1/4 the wage, in 1814, more than half. It is self-evident
that, under these circumstances, the meagre comforts that Eden still found in the
cottage of the agricultural labourer, had vanished by 1814. [80] Of all the animals kept by the farmer, the labourer, the instrumentum vocals, was, thenceforth, the most oppressed, the worst nourished, the most brutally treated.

The same state of things went on quietly until "the Swing riots, in 1830, revealed
to us (i.e., the ruling classes) by the light of blazing corn-stacks, that misery and black
mutinous discontent smouldered quite as fiercely under the surface of agricultural
as of manufacturing England." [81] At this time, Sadler, in the House of Commons, christened the agricultural labourers
"white slaves," and a Bishop echoed the epithet in the Upper House. The most notable
political economist of that period — E. G. Wakefield — says: "The peasant of the South
of England ... is not a freeman, nor is he a slave; he is a pauper." [82]

The time just before the repeal of the Corn Laws threw new light on the condition
of the agricultural labourers. On the one hand; it was to the interest of the middle-class
agitators to prove how little the Corn Laws protected the actual producers of the
corn. On the other hand, the industrial bourgeoisie foamed with sullen rage at the
denunciations of the factory system by the landed aristocracy, at the pretended sympathy
with the woes of the factory operatives, of those utterly corrupt, heartless, and
genteel loafers, and at their "diplomatic zeal" for factory legislation. It is an
old English proverb that "when thieves fall out, honest men come by their own," and,
in fact, the noisy, passionate quarrel between the two fractions of the ruling class
about the question, which of the two exploited the labourers the more shamefully,
was on each hand the midwife of the truth. Earl Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, was
commander-in-chief in the aristocratic, philanthropic, anti-factory campaign. He was,
therefore, in 1845, a favourite subject in the revelations of the Morning Chronicle on the condition of the agricultural labourers. This journal, then the most important
Liberal organ, sent special commissioners into the agricultural districts, who did
not content themselves with mere general descriptions and statistics, but published
the names both of the labouring families examined and of their landlords. The following
list gives the wages paid in three villages in the neighbourhood of Blanford, Wimbourne,
and Poole. The villages are the property of Mr. G. Bankes and of the Earl of Shaftesbury.
It will be noted that, just like Bankes, this "low church pope," this head of English
pietists, pockets a great part of the miserable wages of the labourers under the pretext
of house-rent: —

The repeal of the Corn Laws gave a marvellous impulse to English agriculture. [83] Drainage on the most extensive scale, new methods of stall-feeding, and of the artificial
cultivation of green crops, introduction of mechanical manuring apparatus, new treatment
of clay soils, increased use of numeral manures, employment of the steam-engine, and
of all kinds of new machinery, more intensive cultivation generally, characterised
this epoch. Mr. Pusey, Chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society, declares that the
(relative) expenses of farming have been reduced nearly one half by the introduction
of new machinery. On the other hand, the actual return of the soil rose rapidly. Greater
outlay of capital per acre, and, as a consequence, more rapid concentration of farms,
were essential conditions of the new method. [85] At the same time, the area under cultivation increased, from 1846 to 1856, by 464,119 acres, without reckoning
the great area in the Eastern Counties which was transformed from rabbit warrens and
poor pastures into magnificent corn-fields. It has already been seen that, at the
same time, the total number of persons employed in agriculture fell. As far as the
actual agricultural labourers of both sexes and of all ages are concerned, their number
fell from 1,241,396, in 1851, to 1,163, 217 in 1861. [86] If the English Registrar-General, therefore, rightly remarks: "The increase of farmers
and farm-labourers, since 1801, bears no kind of proportion ... to the increase of
agricultural produce," [87] this disproportion obtains much more for the last period, when a positive decrease
of the agricultural population went hand in hand with increase of the area under cultivation,
with more intensive cultivation, unheard-of accumulation of the capital incorporated
with the soil, and devoted to its working, an augmentation in the products of the
soil without parallel in the history of English agriculture, plethoric rent-rolls
of landlords, and growing wealth of the capitalist farmers. If we take this, together
with the swift, unbroken extension of the markets, viz., the towns, and the reign of Free-trade, then the agricultural labourer was at last,
post tot discrimina rerum, placed in circumstances that ought, secundum ariem, to have made him drunk with happiness.

But Professor Rogers comes to the conclusion that the lot of the English agricultural
labourer of to-day, not to speak of his predecessor in the last half of the 14th and
in the 15th century, but only compared with his predecessor from 1770 to 1780, has
changed for the worse to an extraordinary extent, that "the peasant has again become
a serf," and a serf worse fed and worse clothed. [88] Dr. Julian Hunter, in his epochmaking report on the dwellings of the agricultural
labourers, says: "The cost of the hind" (a name for the agricultural labourer, inherited
from the time of serfdom) "is fixed at the lowest possible amount on which he can
live ... the supplies of wages and shelter are not calculated on the profit to be
derived from him. He is a zero in farming calculations... [89] The means [of subsistence] being always supposed to be a fixed quantity. [90] As to any further reduction of his income, he may say, nihil habeo nihil curo. He has no fears for the future, because he has now only the spare supply necessary
to keep him. He has reached the zero from which are dated the calculations of the
farmer. Come what will, he has no share either in prosperity or adversity." [91]

In the year 1863, an official inquiry took place into the conditions of nourishment
and labour of the criminals condemned to transportation and penal servitude. The results
are recorded in two voluminous Blue books. Among other things it is said: "From an
elaborate comparison between the diet of convicts in the convict prisons in England,
and that of paupers in workhouses and of free labourers in the same country ... it
certainly appears that the former are much better fed than either of the two other
classes," [92] whilst "the amount of labour required from an ordinary convict under penal servitude
is about one half of what would be done by an ordinary day-labourer." [93] A few characteristic depositions of witnesses: John Smith, governor of the Edinburgh prison,
deposes: No. 5056. "The diet of the English prisons [is] superior to that of ordinary
labourers in England." No 50. "It is the fact ... that the ordinary agricultural labourers
in Scotland very seldom get any meat at all." Answer No. 3047. "Is there anything
that you are aware of to account for the necessity of feeding them very much better
than ordinary labourers? — Certainly not." No. 3048. "Do you think that further experiments
ought to be made in order to ascertain whether a dietary might not be hit upon for
prisoners employed on public works nearly approaching to the dietary of free labourers?
..." [94] "He [the agricultural labourer] might say: 'I work hard, and have not enough to eat,
and when in prison I did not work harder where I had plenty to eat, and therefore
it is better for me to be in prison again than here.'" [95] From the tables appended to the first volume of the Report I have compiled the annexed
comparative summary.

The general result of the inquiry by the medical commission of 1863 on the food of
the lowest fed classes, is already known to the reader. He will remember that the
diet of a great part of the agricultural labourers' families is below the minimum
necessary "to arrest starvation diseases." This is especially the case in all the
purely rural districts of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wilts, Stafford, Oxford, Berks,
and Herts. "The nourishment obtained by the labourer himself," says Dr. E. Smith,
"is larger than the average quantity indicates, since he eats a larger share ... necessary
to enable him to perform his labour ... of food than the other members of the family,
including in the poorer districts nearly all the meat and bacon.... The quantity of
food obtained by the wife and also by the children at the period of rapid growth,
is in many cases, in almost every county, deficient, and particularly in nitrogen."
[97] The male and female servants living with the farmers themselves are sufficiently nourished.
Their number fell from 288,277 in 1851, to 204,962 in 1861. "The labour of women in
the fields," says Dr. Smith, "whatever may be its disadvantages, ... is under present
circumstances of great advantage to the family, since it adds that amount of income
which ... provides shoes and clothing and pays the rent, and thus enables the family
to be better fed." [98] One of the most remarkable results of the inquiry was that the agricultural labourer
of England, as compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, "is considerably the
worst fed," as the appended table shows:

Quantities of Carbon and Nitrogen weekly consumed by an average agricultural adult:

"To the insufficient quantity and miserable quality of the house accommodation generally
had," says Dr. Simon, in his official Health Report, "by our agricultural labourers,
almost every page of Dr. Hunter's report bears testimony. And gradually, for many
years past, the state of the labourer in these respects has been deteriorating, house-room
being now greatly more difficult for him to find, and, when found, greatly less suitable
to his needs than, perhaps, for centuries had been the case. Especially within the
last twenty or thirty years, the evil has been in very rapid increase, and the household
circumstances of the labourer are now in the highest degree deplorable. Except in
so far as they whom his labour enriches, see fit to treat him with a kind of pitiful
indulgence, he is quite peculiarly helpless in the matter. Whether he shall find house-room
on the land which he contributes to till, whether the house-room which he gets shall
be human or swinish, whether he shall have the little space of garden that so vastly
lessens the pressure of his poverty — all this does not depend on his willingness
and ability to pay reasonable rent for the decent accommodation he requires, but depends
on the use which others may see fit to make of their 'right to do as they will with
their own.' However large may be a farm, there. is no law that a certain proportion
of labourers' dwellings (much less of decent dwellings) shall be upon it; nor does any law reserve for the labourer ever so little right in
that soil to which his industry is as needful as sun and rain.... An extraneous element
weighs the balance heavily against him ... the influence of the Poor Law in its provisions
concerning settlement and chargeability. [100] Under this influence, each parish has a pecuniary interest in reducing to a minimum
the number of its resident labourers: — for, unhappily, agricultural labour instead
of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hardworking labourer and his
family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism
— a pauperism which, during the whole circuit, is so near, that any illness or temporary
failure of occupation necessitates immediate recourse to parochial relief — and thus
all residence of agricultural population in a parish is glaringly an addition to its
poor-rates .... Large proprietors [101] ... have but to resolve that there shall be no labourers' dwellings on their estates,
and their estates will thenceforth be virtually free from half their responsibility
for the poor. How far it has been intended, in the English constitution and law, that
this kind of unconditional property in land should be acquirable, and that a landlord
'doing as he wills with his own,' should be able to treat the cultivators of the soil
as aliens, whom he may expel from his territory, is a question which I do not pretend
to discuss.... For that (power) of eviction ... does not exist only in theory. On
a very large scale it prevails in practice — prevails ... as a main governing condition
in the household circumstances of agricultural labour.... As regards the extent of
the evil, it may suffice to refer to the evidence which Dr. Hunter has compiled from
the last census, that destruction of houses, notwithstanding increased local demands
for them, had, during the last ten years, been in progress in 821 separate parishes
or townships of England, so that irrespectively of persons who had been forced to
become non-resident (that is in the parishes in which they work), these parishes and townships were receiving in 1861, as compared with 1851, a population
5 1/3 per cent. greater, into houseroom 4 1/2 per cent. less... When the process of
depopulation has completed itself, the result, says Dr. Hunter, is a show-village
where the cottages have been reduced to a few, and where none but persons who are
needed as shepherds, gardeners, or game-keepers, are allowed to live; regular servants
who receive the good treatment usual to their class. [102] But the land requires cultivation, and it will be found that the labourers employed
upon it are not the tenants of the owner, but that they come from a neighbouring open
village, perhaps three miles off, where a numerous small proprietary had received
them when their cottages were destroyed in the close villages around. Where things
are tending to the above result, often the cottages which stand, testify, in their
unrepaired and wretched condition, to the extinction to which they are doomed. They
are seen standing in the various stages of natural decay. While the shelter holds
together, the labourer is permitted to rent it, and glad enough he will often be to
do so, even at the price of decent lodging. But no repair, no improvement shall it
receive, except such as its penniless occupants can supply. And when at last it becomes
quite uninhabitable — uninhabitable even to the humblest standard of serfdom — it
will be but one more destroyed cottage, and future poor-rates will be somewhat lightened.
While great owners are thus escaping from poor-rates through the depopulation of lands
over which they have control, the nearest town or open village receive the evicted
labourers: the nearest, I say, but this "nearest" may mean three or four miles distant
from the farm where the labourer has his daily toil. To that daily toil there will
then have to be added, as though it were nothing, the daily need of walking six or
eight miles for power of earning his bread. And whatever farmwork is done by his wife
and children, is done at the same disadvantage. Nor is this nearly all the toil which
the distance occasions him. In the open village, cottage-speculators buy scraps of
land, which they throng as densely as they can with the cheapest of all possible hovels.
And into those wretched habitations (which, even if they adjoin the open country,
have some of the worst features of the worst town residences) crowd the agricultural
labourers of England. [103] .... Nor on the other hand must it be supposed that even when the labourer is housed
upon the lands which he cultivates, his household circumstances are generally such
as his life of productive industry would seem to deserve. Even on princely estates
... his cottage ... may be of the meanest description. There are landlords who deem
any stye good enough for their labourer and his family, and who yet do not disdain
to drive with him the hardest possible bargain for rent. [104] It may be but a ruinous one-bedroomed hut, having no fire-grate, no privy, no opening
window, no water supply but the ditch, no garden — but the labourer is helpless against
the wrong.... And the Nuisances Removal Acts ... are ... a mere dead letter ... in
great part dependent for their working on such cottage-owners as the one from whom
his (the labourer's) hovel is rented.... From brighter, but exceptional scenes, it
is requisite in the interests of justice, that attention should again be drawn to
the overwhelming preponderance of facts which are a reproach to the civilisation of
England. Lamentable indeed, must be the case, when, notwithstanding all that is evident
with regard to the quality of the present accommodation, it is the common conclusion
of competent observers that even the general badness of dwellings is an evil infinitely
less urgent than their mere numerical insufficiency. For years the over-crowding of
rural labourers' dwellings has been a matter of deep concern, not only to persons
who care for sanitary good, but to persons who care for decent and moral life. For,
again and again in phrases so uniform that they seem stereotyped, reporters on the
spread of epidemic disease in rural districts, have insisted en the extreme importance
of that over-crowding, as an influence which renders it a quite hopeless task, to
attempt the limiting of any infection which is introduced. And again and again it
has been pointed out that, notwithstanding the many salubrious influences which there
are in country life, the crowding which so favours the extension of contagious disease,
also favours the origination of disease which is not contagious. And those who have
denounced the over-crowded state of our rural population have not been silent as to
a further mischief. Even where their primary concern has been only with the injury
to health, often almost perforce they have referred to other relations on the subject.
In showing how frequently it happens that adult persons of both sexes, married and
unmarried, are huddled together in single small sleeping rooms, their reports have
carried the conviction that, under the circumstances they describe, decency must always be outraged, and morality
almost of necessity must suffer. [105] Thus, for instance, in the appendix of my last annual report, Dr. Ord, reporting
on an outbreak of fever at Wing, in Buckinghamshire, mentions how a young man who
had come thither from Wingrave with fever, "in the first days of his illness slept
in a room with nine other persons. Within a fortnight several of these persons were
attacked, and in the course of a few weeks five out of the nine had fever, and one
died..." From Dr. Harvey, of St. George's Hospital, who, on private professional business,
visited Wing during the time of the epidemic, I received information exactly in the
sense of the above report.... "A young woman having fever, lay at night in a room
occupied by her father and mother, her bastard child, two young men (her brothers),
and her two sisters, each with a bastard child — 10 persons in all. A few weeks ago
13 persons slept in it." [106]

Dr. Hunter investigated 5,375 cottages of agricultural labourers, not only in the
purely agricultural districts, but in all counties of England. Of these, 2,195 had
only one bedroom (often at the same time used as living-room), 2,930 only two, and
250, more than two. I will give a few specimens culled from a dozen counties.

(1.) Bedfordshire

Wrestlingworth. Bedrooms about 12 feet long and 10 broad, although many are smaller than this. The
small, one-storied cots are often divided by partitions into two bedrooms, one bed
frequently in a kitchen, 5 feet 6 inches in height. Rent, £3 a year. The tenants have
to make their own privies, the landlord only supplies a hole. As soon as one has made
a privy, it is made use of by the whole neighbourhood. One house, belonging to a family
called Richardson, was of quite unapproachable beauty. "Its plaster walls bulged very
like a lady's dress in a curtsey. One gable end was convex, the other concave, and
on this last, unfortunately, stood the chimney, a curved tube of clay and wood like
an elephant's trunk. A long stick served as prop to prevent the chimney from falling.
The doorway and window were rhomboidal." Of 17 houses visited, only 4 had more than
one bedroom, and those four over-crowded. The cots with one bedroom sheltered 3 adults
and 3 children, a married couple with 6 children, &c.

Dunton. High rents, from £4 to £5; weekly wages of the man, 10s. They hope to pay the rent
by the straw-plaiting of the family. The higher the rent, the greater the number that
must work together to pay it. Six adults, living with 4 children in one sleeping apartment,
pay £3 10s. for it. The cheapest house in Dunton, 15 feet long externally, 10 broad,
let for £3. Only one of the houses investigated had 2 bedrooms. A little outside the
village, a house whose "tenants dunged against the house-side," the lower 9 inches
of the door eaten away through sheer rottenness; the doorway, a single opening closed
at night by a few bricks, ingeniously pushed up after shutting and covered with some
matting. Half a window, with glass and frame, had gone the way of all flesh. Here,
without furniture, huddled together were 3 adults and 5 children. Dunton is not worse
than the rest of Biggleswade Union.

(2.) Berkshire

Beenham. In June, 1864, a man, his wife and 4 children lived in a cot (one-storied cottage).
A daughter came home from service with scarlet fever. She died. One child sickened
and died. The mother and one child were down with typhus when Dr. Hunter was called
in. The father and one child slept outside, but the difficulty of securing isolation
was seen here, for in the crowded market of the miserable village lay the linen of
the fever-stricken household, waiting for the wash. The rent of H.'s house, 1s. a-week;
one bedroom for man, wife, and 6 children. One house let for 8d. a-week, 14 feet 6
inches long, 7 feet broad, kitchen, 6 feet high; the bedroom without window, fire-place,
door, or opening, except into the lobby; no garden. A man lived here for a little
while, with two grown-up daughters and one grown-up son; father and son slept on the
bed, the girls in the passage. Each of the latter had a child while the family was
living here, but one went to the workhouse for her confinement and then came home.

(3.) Buckinghamshire

30 cottages — on 1,000 acres of land — contained here about 130-140 persons. The parish
of Bradenham comprises 1,000 acres; it numbered, in 1851, 36 houses and a population of 84 males
and 54 females. This inequality of the sexes was partly remedied in 1861, when they
numbered 98 males and 87 females; increase in 10 years of 14 men and 33 women. Meanwhile,
the number of houses was one less.

Winslow. Great part of this newly built in good style; demand for houses appears very marked,
since very miserable cots let at 1s. to 1s. 3d. per week.

Water Eaton. Here the landlords, in view of the increasing population, have destroyed about 20
per cent. of the existing houses. A poor labourer, who had to go about 4 miles to
his work, answered the question, whether he could not find a cot nearer: "No; they
know better than to take a man in with my large family."

Tinker's End, near Winslow. A bedroom in which were 4 adults and 4 children; 11 feet long, 9 feet
broad, 6 feet 5 inches high at its highest part; another 11 feet 3 inches by 9 feet,
5 feet 10 inches high, sheltered 6 persons. Each of these families had less space
than is considered necessary for a convict. No house had more than one bedroom, not
one of them a back-door; water very scarce; weekly rent from 1s. 4d. to 2s. In 16
of the houses visited, only 1 man that earned 10s. a-week. The quantity of air for
each person under the circumstances just described corresponds to that which he would
have if he were shut up in a box of 4 feet measuring each way, the whole night. But
then, the ancient dens afforded a certain amount of unintentional ventilation.

(4.) Cambridgeshire

Gamblingay belongs to several landlords. It contains the wretchedest cots to be found anywhere.
Much straw-plaiting. "A deadly lassitude, a hopeless surrendering up to filth," reigns
in Gamblingay. The neglect in its centre, becomes mortification at its extremities,
north and south, where the houses are rotting to pieces. The absentee landlords bleed
this poor rookery too freely. The rents are very high; 8 or 9 persons packed in one
sleeping apartment, in 2 cases 6 adults, each with 1 or 2 children in one small bedroom.

(5.) Essex

In this county, diminutions in the number of persons and of cottages go, in many parishes,
hand in hand. In not less than 22 parishes, however, the destruction of houses has
not prevented increase of population, or has not brought about that expulsion which,
under the name "migration to towns," generally occurs. In Fingringhoe, a parish of
3,443 acres, were in 1851, 145 houses; in 1861, only 110. But the people did not wish
to go away, and managed even to increase under these circumstances. In 1851, 252 persons
inhabited 61 houses, but in 1861, 262 persons were squeezed into 49 houses. In Basilden,
in 1851, 157 persons lived on 1,827 acres, in 35 houses; at the end of ten years,
180 persons in 27 houses. In the parishes of Fingringhoe, South Fambridge, Widford,
Basilden, and Ramsden Crags, in 1851, 1,392 persons were living on 8,449 acres in
316 houses; in 1861, on the same area, 1,473 persons in 249 houses.

(6.) Herefordshire

This little county has suffered more from the "eviction-spirit" than any other in
England. At Nadby, over-crowded cottages generally, with only 2 bedrooms, belonging
for the most part to the farmers. They easily let them for £3 or £4 a-year, and paid
a weekly wage of 9s.

(7) Huntingdon

Hartford had, in 1851, 87 houses; shortly after this, 19 cottages were destroyed in this small
parish of 1,720 acres; population in 1831, 452; in 1852, 832; and in 1861, 341. 14
cottages, each with 1 bedroom, were visited. In one, a married couple, 3 grown-up
sons, 1 grown-up daughter, 4 children — in all 10 in another, 3 adults, 6 children.
One of these rooms, in which 8 people slept, was 12 feet 10 inches long, 12 feet 2
inches broad, 6 feet 9 inches high: the average, without making any deduction for
projections into the apartment, gave about 130 cubic feet per head. In the 14 sleeping
rooms, 34 adults and 33 children. These cottages are seldom provided with gardens,
but many of the inmates are able to farm small allotments at 10s. or 12s. per rood.
These allotments are at a distance from the houses, which are without privies. The
family "must either go to the allotment to deposit their ordures," or, as happens
in this place, saving your presence, "use a closet with a trough set like a drawer
in a chest of drawers, and drawn out weekly and conveyed to the allotment to be emptied
where its contents were wanted." In Japan, the circle of life-conditions moves more
decently than this.

(8) Lincolnshire

Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright's house, with his wife, her mother, and 5 children; the
house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen
and bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet
2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The bedroom is a garret: the walls run together into
the roof like a sugar-loaf, a dormer-window opening in front. "Why did he live here?
On account of the garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near
his work? No; 6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived
there, because it was a tenantable cot," and because he wanted to have a cot for himself
alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are the statistics
of 12 houses in Langtoft, with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36 children.

TWELVE HOUSES IN LANGTOFT

House

No. 1.

No. 2.

No. 3.

No. 4.

No. 5.

No. 6.

No. 7.

No. 8.

No. 9.

No. 10.

No. 11.

No. 12.

Bedrooms.

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

Adults.

3

4

4

5

2

5

3

3

2

2

3

2

Children.

5

3

4

4

2

3

3

2

0

3

3

4

Number ofPersons.

8

7

8

9

4

8

6

5

2

.5

6

6

(9.) Kent

Kennington, very seriously over-populated in 1859, when diphtheria appeared, and the parish doctor
instituted a medical inquiry into the condition of the poorer classes. He found that
in this locality, where much labour is employed, various cots had been destroyed and
no new ones built. In one district stood four houses, named birdcages; each had 4
rooms of the following dimensions in feet and inches:

Kitchen: 9 ft. 5 by 8 ft. 11 by 6 ft. 6

Scullery: 8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6

Bedroom: 8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft. 3

Bedroom: 8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3

(10.) Northamptonshire

Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter 2030 men were lounging about the streets from want
of work. The farmers do not always till sufficiently the corn and turnip lands, and
the landlord has found it best to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3. Hence
want of employment. Whilst on one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on
the other side the defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances. Feverishly
over-worked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say in
their peculiar dialect, "the parson and gentlefolk seem frit to death at them."

At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with 4, 5, 6
children; 3 adults with 5 children; a couple with grandfather and 6 children down
with scarlet fever, &c.; in two houses with two bedrooms, two families of 8 and 9
adults respectively.

(11.) Wiltshire

Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom. Pentill, in the same parish: a cot let
at Is. 3d. weekly with 4 adults and 4 children, had nothing good about it, except
the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.

(12.) Worcestershire

House-destruction here not quite so excessive; yet from 1851 to 1861, the number of
inhabitants to each house on the average, has risen from 4.2 to 4.6.

Badsey. Many cots and little gardens here. Some of the farmers declare that the cots are
"a great nuisance here, because they bring the poor." On the statement of one gentleman:
"The poor are none the better for them; if you build 500 they will let fast enough,
in fact, the more you build, the more they want" (according to him the houses give
birth to the inhabitants, who then by a law of Nature press on "the means of housing").
Dr. Hunter remarks: "Now these poor must come from somewhere, and as there is no particular
attraction, such as doles, at Badsey, it must be repulsion from some other unfit place,
which will send them here. If each could find an allotment near his work, he would
not prefer Badsey, where he pays for his scrap of ground twice as much as the farmer
pays for his."

The continual emigration to the towns, the continual formation of surplus-population
in the country through the concentration of farms, conversion of arable land into
pasture, machinery, &c., and the continual eviction of the agricultural population
by the destruction of their cottages, go hand in hand. The more empty the district
is of men, the greater is its "relative surplus-population," the greater is their pressure on the means of employment, the greater is the absolute
excess of the agricultural population over the means for housing it, the greater,
therefore, in the villages is the local surplus-population and the most pestilential
packing together of human beings. The packing together of knots of men in scattered
little villages and small country towns corresponds to the forcible draining of men
from the surface of the land. The continuous superseding of the agricultural labourers,
in spite of their diminishing number and the increasing mass of their products, gives
birth to their pauperism. Their pauperism is ultimately a motive to their eviction
and the chief source of their miserable housing which breaks down their last power
of resistance. and makes them more slaves of the landed proprietors and the farmers.
[107] Thus the minimum of wages becomes a law of Nature to them. On the other hand, the land, in spite of its constant "relative surplus-population,"
is at the same time under-populated. This is seen, not only locally at the points
where the efflux of men to towns, mines, railroad-making, &c., is most marked. It
is to be seen everywhere, in harvest-time as well as in spring and summer, at those
frequently recurring times when English agriculture, so careful and intensive, wants
extra hands. There are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary, and
always too few for the exceptional or temporary needs of the cultivation of the soil.
[108] "Hence we find in the official documents contradictory complaints from the same places of deficiency and excess of labour
simultaneously. The temporary or local want of labour brings about no rise in wages,
but a forcing of the women and children into the fields, and exploitation at an age
constantly lowered. As soon as the exploitation of the women and children takes place
on a larger scale, it becomes in turn a new means of making a surplus-population of
the male agricultural labourer and of keeping down his wage. In the east of England
thrives a beautiful fruit of this vicious circle — the so-called gang-system, to which
I must briefly return here. [109]

The gang-system obtains almost exclusively in the counties of Lincoln, Huntingdon,
Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Nottingham, here and there in the neighbouring counties
of Northampton, Bedford, and Rutland. Lincolnshire will serve us as an example. A
large part of this county is new land, marsh formerly, or even, as in others of the
eastern counties just named, won lately from the sea. The steam-engine has worked
wonders in the way of drainage. What were once fens and sandbanks, bear now a luxuriant
sea of corn and the highest of rents. The same thing holds of the alluvial lands won
by human endeavour, as in the island of Axholme and other parishes on the banks of
the Trent. In proportion as the new farms arose, not only were no new cottages built:
old ones were demolished, and the supply of labour had to come from open villages,
miles

away, by long roads that wound along the sides of the hills. There alone had the population
formerly found shelter from the incessant floods of the winter-time. The labourers
that dwell on the farms of 400-1,000 acres (they are called "confined labourers") are solely employed on such kinds of agricultural
work as is permanent, difficult, and carried on by aid of horses. For every 100 acres
there is, on an average, scarcely one cottage. A fen farmer, e.g., gave evidence before
the Commission of Inquiry: "I farm 320 acres, all arable land. I have not one cottage
on my farm. I have only one labourer on my farm now. I have four horsemen lodging
about. We get light work done by gangs." [110] The soil requires much light field labour, such as weeding, hoeing, certain processes
of manuring, removing of stones, &c. This is done by the gangs, or organised bands
that dwell in the open villages.

The gang consists of 10 to 40 or 50 persons, women, young persons of both sexes (13-18
years of age, although the boys are for the most part eliminated at the age of 13),
and children of both sexes (6-13 years of age). At the head is the gang-master, always
an ordinary agricultural labourer, generally what is called a bad lot, a scapegrace,
unsteady, drunken, but with a dash of enterprise and savoir-faire. He is the recruiting-sergeant for the gang, which works under him, not under the
farmer. He generally arranges with the latter for piece-work, and his income, which
on the average is not very much above that of an ordinary agricultural labourer, [111] depends almost entirely upon the dexterity with which he manages to extract within
the shortest time the greatest possible amount of labour from his gang. The farmers
have discovered that women work steadily only under the direction of men, but that
women and children, once set going, impetuously spend their life-force — as Fourier
knew — while the adult male labourer is shrewd enough to economise his as much as
he can. The gang-master goes from one farm to another, and thus employs his gang from
6 to 8 months in the year. Employment by him is, therefore, much more lucrative and
more certain for the labouring families, than employment by the individual farmer,
who only employs children occasionally. This circumstance so completely rivets his
influence in the open villages that children are generally only to be hired through
his instrumentality. The lending out of these individually, independently of the gang,
is his second trade.

The "drawbacks" of the system are the over-work of the children and young persons,
the enormous marches that they make daily to and from the farms, 5, 6, and sometimes
7 miles distant, finally, the demoralisation of-the gang. Although the gang-master,
who, in some districts is called "the driver," is armed with a long stick, he uses
it but seldom, and complaints of brutal treatment are exceptional. He is a democratic.
emperor, or a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin. He must therefore be popular with his
subjects, and he binds them to himself by the charms of the gipsy life under his direction.
Coarse freedom, a noisy jollity, and obscenest impudence give attractions to the gang.
Generally the gangmaster pays up in a public house; then he retums home at the head
of the procession reeling drunk, propped up right and left by a stalwart virago, while
children and young persons bring up the rear, boisterous, and singing chaffing and
bawdy songs. On the return journey what Fourier calls "phanerogamie," is the order
of the day. The getting with child of girls of 13 and 14 by their male companions
of the same age, is common. The open villages which supply the contingent of the gang,
become Sodoms and Gomorrahs, [112] and have twice as high a rate of illegitimate births as the rest of the kingdom.
The moral character of girls bred in these schools, when married women, was shown
above. Their children, when opium does not give them the finishing stroke, are born
recruits of the gang.

The gang in its classical form just described, is called the public, common, or tramping
gang. For there are also private gangs. These are made up in the same way as the common
gang, but count fewer members, and work, not under a gang-master, but under some old
farm servant, whom the farmer does not know how to employ in any better way. The gipsy
fun has vanished here, but according to all witnesses, the payment and treatment of
the children is worse.

The gang-system, which during the last years has steadily increased, [113] clearly does not exist for the sake of the gang-master. it exists for the enrichment
of the large farmers, [114] and indirectly of the landlords. [115] For the farmer there is no more ingenious method of keeping his labourers well below
the normal level, and yet of always having an extra hand ready for extra work, of
extracting the greatest possible amount of labour with the least possible amount of
money [116] and of making adult male labour "redundant." From the exposition already made, it
will be understood why, on the one hand, a greater or less lack of employment for
the agricultural labourer is admitted, while on the other, the gang-system is at the
same time declared "necessary" on account of the want of adult male labour and its
migration to the towns. [117] The cleanly weeded land, and the uncleanly human weeds, of Lincolnshire, are pole
and counterpole of capitalistic production. [118]

F. Ireland

In concluding this section, we must travel for a moment to Ireland. First, the main
facts of the case.

The population of Ireland had, in 1841, reached 8,222,664; in 1851, it had dwindled
to 6,623,985; in 1861, to 5,850,309; in 1866, to 5 1/2 millions, nearly to its level
in 1801. The diminution began with the famine year, 1846, so that Ireland, in less
than twenty years, lost more than 5/16 ths of its people. [119] Its total emigration from May, 1851, to July, 1865, numbered 1,591,487: the emigration
during the years 1861-1865 was more than half-a-million. The number of inhabited houses
fell, from 1851-1861, by 52,990. From 1851-1861, the number of holdings of 15 to 30
acres increased 61,000, that of holdings over 30 acres, 109,000, whilst the total
number of all farms fell 120,000, a fall, therefore, solely due to the suppression
of farms under 15 acres — i.e., to their centralisation.

Table A

LIVE-STOCK

Year

Horses

Cattle

Sheep

Pigs

Total Number

Decrease

Total Number

Decrease

Increase

Total Number

Decrease

Increase

Total Number

Decrease

Increase

1860

619,811

3,606,374

3,542,080

1,271,072

1861

614,232

5,579

3,471,688

134,686

3,556,050

13,970

1,102,042

169,030

1862

602,894

11,338

3,254,890

216,798

3,456,132

99,918

1,154,324

52,282

1863

579,978

22,916

3,144,231

110,659

3,308,204

147,982

1,067,458

86,866

1864

562,158

17,820

3,262,294

118,063

3,366,941

58,737

1,058,480

8,978

1865

547,867

14,291

3,493,414

231,120

3,688,742

321,801

1,299,893

241,413

The decrease of the population was naturally accompanied by a decrease in the mass
of products. For our purpose, it suffices to consider the 5 years from 1861-1865 during
which over half-a-million emigrated, and the absolute number of people sank by more
than 1 of a million. From the above table it results: —

Let us now turn to agriculture, which yields the means of subsistence for cattle and
for men. In the following table is calculated the decrease or increase for each separate
year, as compared with its immediate predecessor. The Cereal Crops include wheat,
oats, barley, rye, beans, and peas; the Green Crops, potatoes, turnips, marigolds,
beet-root, cabbages, carrots, parsnips, vetches. &c.

Table B

INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CROPS AND GRASS IN ACREAGE

Year

Cereal Crop

Green Crop

Grass and Clover

Flax

Total Cultivated Land

Decrease(Acres)

Decrease(Acres)

Increase(Acres)

Decrease(Acres)

Increase(Acres)

Decrease(Acres)

Increase(Acres)

Decrease(Acres)

Increase(Acres)

1861

15,701

36,974

47,969

19,271

81,373

1862

72,734

74,785

6,623

2,055

138,841

1863

144,719

19,358

7,724

63,922

92,431

1864

122,437

2,317

47,486

87,761

10,493

1865

72,450

25,241

68,970

50,159

28,398

1861-65

428,041

108,193

82,834

122,8501

330,350

In the year 1865, 127,470 additional acres came under the heading "grass land," chiefly
because the area under the heading of "bog and waste unoccupied," decreased by 101,543
acres. If we compare 1865 with 1864, there is a decrease in cereals of 246,667 qrs.,
of which 48,999 were wheat, 160,605 oats, 29,892 barley, &c.: the decrease in potatoes
was 446,398 tons, although the area of their cultivation increased in 1865.

From the movement of population and the agricultural produce of Ireland, we pass to
the movement in the purse of its landlords, larger farmers, and industrial capitalists.
It is reflected in the rise and fall of the Income-tax. It may be remembered that
Schedule D. (profits with the exception of those of farmers), includes also the so-called,
"professional" profits — i.e., the incomes of lawyers, doctors, &c.; and the Schedules C. and E., in which no
special details are given, include the incomes of employees, officers, State sinecurists,
State fundholders, &c.

INCREASE OR DECREASE IN THE AREA UNDER CULTIVATION, PRODUCT PER ACRE, AND TOTAL PRODUCT OF 1865 COMPARED WITH 1864

Product

Acres of Cultivated Land

Product per Acre

Total Product

1864

1865

Increase or Decrease, 1865

1864

1865

Increase or Decrease, 1865

1864

1865

Increase or Decrease, 1865

Wheat

276,483

266,989

9,494

cwt., 13.3

13.0

0.3

875,782 Qrs.

826,783 Qrs.

48,999 Qrs.

Oats

1,814,886

1,745,228

69,658

cwt., 12.1

12.3

0.2

7,826,332 Qrs.

7,659,727 Qrs.

166,605 Qrs.

Barley

172,700

177,102

4,402

cwt., 15.9

14.9

1.0

761,909 Qrs.

732,017 Qrs.

29,892 Qrs.

Bere

8,894

10,091

1,197

cwt., 16.4

14.8

1.6

15,160 Qrs.

13,989 Qrs.

1,171 Qrs.

Rye

cwt., 8.5

10.4

1.9

12,680 Qrs.

18,314 Qrs.

5,684 Qrs.

Potatoes

1,039,724

1,066,260

26,536

tons, 4.1

3.6

0.5

4,312,388 ts.

3,865,990 ts.

446,398 ts.

Turnips

337,355

334,212

3,143

tons, 10.3

9.9

0.4

3,467,659 ts.

3,301,683 ts.

165,976 ts.

Mangold-wurzel

14,073

14,389

316

tons, 10.5

13.3

2.8

147,284 ts.

191,937 ts.

44,653 ts.

Cabbages

31,821

33,622

1,801

tons, 9.3

10.4

1.1

297,375 ts.

350,252 ts.

52,877 ts.

Flax

301,693

251,433

50,260

st. (14 lb.) 34.2

25.2

9.0

64,506 st.

39,561 st.

24,945 st.

Hay

1,609,569

1,678,493

68,9241

tons, 1.6

1.8

0.2

2,607,153 ts.

3,068,707 ts.

461,554 ts.

Table D

THE INCOME-TAX ON THE SUBJOINED INCOMES IN POUNDS STERLING (Tenth Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue, Lond. 1866.)

1860

1861

1862

1863

1864

1865

Schedule A.Rent of Land

13,893,829

13,003,554

13,398,938

13,494,091

13,470,700

13,801,616

Schedule B.Farmers' Profits.

2,765,387

2,773,644

2,937,899

2,938,923

2,930,874

2,946,072

Schedule D.Industrial,&c., Profits

4,891,652

4,836,203

4,858,800

4,846,497

4,546,147

4,850,199

Total SchedulesA to E

22,962,885

22,998,394

23,597,574

23,658,631

23,236,298

23,930,340

Under Schedule D., the average annual increase of income from 1853-1864 was only 0.93;
whilst, in the same period, in Great Britain, it was 4.58. The following table shows
the distribution of the profits (with the exception of those of farmers) for the years
1864 and 1865: —

England, a country with fully developed capitalist production, and pre-eminently industrial,
would have bled to death with such a drain of population as Ireland has suffered.
But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of England, marked off by
a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial
and military recruits.

The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, has greatly
diminished the produce of the soil, [123] and, in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding, has brought about,
in some of its branches, an absolute diminution, in others, an advance scarcely worthy
of mention, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, with the fall
in numbers of the population, rents and farmers' profits rose, although the latter
not as steadily as the former. The reason of this is easily comprehensible. On the
one hand, with the throwing of small holdings into large ones, and the change of arable
into pasture land, a larger part of the whole produce was transformed into surplus-produce.
The surplus-produce increased, although the total produce, of which it formed a fraction,
decreased. On the other hand, the money-value of this surplus-produce increased yet
more rapidly than its mass, in consequence of the rise in the English market-price
of meat, wool, &c., during the last 20, and especially during the last 10, years.

The scattered means of production that serve the producers themselves as means of
employment and of subsistence, without expanding their own value by the incorporation
of the labour of others, are no more capital than a product consumed by its own producer
is a commodity. If, with the mass of the population, that of the means of production
employed in agriculture also diminished, the mass of the capital employed in agriculture
increased, because a part of the means of production that were formerly scattered,
was concentrated and turned into capital.

The total capital of Ireland outside agriculture, employed in industry and trade,
accumulated during the last two decades slowly, and with great and constantly recurring
fluctuations; so much the more rapidly did the concentration of its individual constituents
develop. And, however small its absolute increase, in proportion to the dwindling
population it had increased largely.

Here, then, under our own eyes and on a large scale, a process is revealed, than which
nothing more excellent could be wished for by orthodox economy for the support of
its dogma: that misery springs from absolute surplus-population, and that equilibrium
is re-established by depopulation. This is a far more important experiment than was
the plague in the middle of the 14th century so belauded of Malthusians. Note further:
If only the naïveté of the schoolmaster could apply, to the conditions of production
and population of the nineteenth century, the standard of the 14th, this naïveté,
into the bargain, overlooked the fact that whilst, after the plague and the decimation
that accompanied it, followed on this side of the Channel, in England, enfranchisement
and enrichment of the agricultural population, on that side, in France, followed greater
servitude and more misery. [124]

The Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils
only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage. The exodus of
the next 20 years, an exodus still constantly increasing, did not, as, e.g., the Thirty Years' War, decimate, along with the human beings, their means of production.
Irish genius discovered an altogether new way of spiriting a poor people thousands
of miles away from the scene of its misery. The exiles transplanted to the United
States, send home sums of money every year as travelling expenses for those left behind.
Every troop that emigrates one year, draws another after it the next. Thus, instead
of costing Ireland anything, emigration forms one of the most lucrative branches of
its export trade. Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make
a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are
replaced by the births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by
year. [125]

What were the consequences for the Irish labourers left behind and freed from the
surplus-population? That the relative surplus-population is to-day as great as before
1846; that wages are just as low, that the oppression of the labourers has increased,
that misery is forcing the country towards a new crisis. The facts are simple. The revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration.
The production of relative surplus-population has more than kept pace with the absolute
depopulation. A glance at table C. shows that the change of arable to pasture land
must work yet more acutely in Ireland than in England. In England the cultivation
of green crops increases with the breeding of cattle; in Ireland, it decreases. Whilst
a large number of acres, that were formerly tilled, lie idle or are turned permanently
into grass-land, a great part of the waste land and peat bogs that were unused formerly,
become of service for the extension of cattle-breeding. The smaller and medium farmers
— I reckon among these all who do not cultivate more than 100 acres — still make up
about 8/10ths of the whole number. [126] They are one after the other, and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed
by the competition of an agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually
furnish new recruits to the class of wage-labourers. The one great industry of Ireland,
linen-manufacture, requires relatively few adult men and only employs altogether,
in spite of its expansion since the price of cotton rose in 1861-1866, a comparatively
insignificant part of the population. Like all other great modem industries, it constantly
produces, by incessant fluctuations, a relative surplus-population within its own
sphere, even with an absolute increase in the mass of human beings absorbed by it.
The misery of the agricultural population forms the pedestal for gigantic shirt-factories,
whose armies of labourers are, for the most part, scattered over the country. Here,
we encounter again the system described above of domestic industry, which in underpayment
and over-work, possesses its own systematic means for creating supernumerary labourers.
Finally, although the depopulation has not such destructive consequences as would
result in a country with fully developed capitalistic production, it does not go on
without constant reaction upon the home-market. The gap which emigration causes here,
limits not only the local demand for labour, but also the incomes of small shopkeepers,
artisans, tradespeople generally. Hence the diminution in incomes between £60 and
£100 in Table E.

A clear statement of the condition of the agricultural labourers in Ireland is to
be found in the Reports of the Irish Poor Law Inspectors (1870). [127] Officials of a government which is maintained only by bayonets and by a state of
siege, now open, now disguised, they have to observe all the precautions of language
that their colleagues in England disdain. In spite of this, however, they do not let
their government cradle itself in illusions. According to them the rate of wages in
the country, still very low, has within the last 20 years risen 50-60 per cent., and
stands now, on the average, at 6s. to 9s. per week. But behind this apparent rise,
is hidden an actual fall in wages, for it does not correspond at all to the rise in
price of the necessary means of subsistence that has taken place in the meantime.
For proof, the following extract from the official accounts of an Irish workhouse.

AVERAGE WEEKLY COST PER HEAD

Year ended

Provisions and Necessaries.

Clothing.

TOTAL.

29th Sept., 1849.

1s. 3 1/4d.

3d.

1s. 6 1/4d.

29th Sept., 1869.

2s. 7 1/4d.

6d.

3s. 1 1/4d.

The price of the necessary means of subsistence is therefore fully twice, and that
of clothing exactly twice, as much as they were 20 years before.

Even apart from this disproportion, the mere comparison of the rate of wages expressed
in gold would give a result far from accurate. Before the famine, the great mass of
agricultural wages were paid in kind, only the smallest part in money; to-day, payment
in money is the rule. From this it follows that, whatever the amount of the real wage,
its money rate must rise. "Previous to the famine, the labourer enjoyed his cabin
... with a rood, or half-acre or acre of land, and facilities for ... a crop of potatoes.
He was able to rear his pig and keep fowl.... But they now have to buy bread, and
they have no refuse upon which they can feed a pig or fowl, and they have consequently
no benefit from the sale of a pig, fowl, or eggs." [128] In fact, formerly, the agricultural labourers were but the smallest of the small
farmers, and formed for the most part a kind of rear-guard of the medium and large
farms on which they found employment. Only since the catastrophe of 1846 have they
begun to form a fraction of the class of purely wage-labourers, a special class, connected
with its wage-masters only by monetary relations.

We know what were the conditions of their dwellings in 1846. Since then they have
grown yet worse. A part of the agricultural labourers, which, however, grows less
day by day, dwells still on the holdings of the farmers in over-crowded huts, whose
hideousness far surpasses the worst that the English agricultural labourers offered
us in this way. And this holds generally with the exception of certain tracts of Ulster;
in the south, in the counties of Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, &c.; in the east, in Wicklow,
Wexford, &c.; in the centre of Ireland, in King's and Queen's County,, Dublin, &c.;
in the west, in Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, &c. "The agricultural labourers' huts,"
an inspector cries out, "are a disgrace to the Christianity and to the civilisation
of this country." [129] In order to increase the attractions of these holes for the labourers, the pieces
of land belonging thereto from time immemorial, are systematically confiscated. "The
mere sense that they exist subject to this species of ban, on the part of the landlords
and their agents, has ... given birth in the minds of the labourers to corresponding
sentiments of antagonism and dissatisfaction towards those by whom they are thus led
to regard themselves as being treated as ... a proscribed race." [130]

The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts situated on
the field of labour. This was done on the largest scale, and as if in obedience to
a command from on high. Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages
and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into garrets, holes, cellars and comers,
in the worst back slums. Thousands of Irish families, who according to the testimony
of the English, eaten up as these are with national prejudice, are notable for their
rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and the purity of their home-life,
found themselves suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged
to seek work of the neighbouring farmers and are only hired by the day, and therefore
under the most precarious form of wage. Hence "they sometimes have long distances
to go to and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently
ending in sickness, disease and want." [131]

"The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the surplus-labour
of the rural division;" [132] and then people still wonder "there is still a surplus of labour in the towns and
villages, and either a scarcity or a threatened scarcity in some of the country divisions."
[133] The truth is that this want only becomes perceptible "in harvest-time, or during
spring, or at such times as agricultural operations are carried on with activity;
at other periods of the year many hands are idle;" [134] that "from the digging out of the main crop of potatoes in October until the early
spring following ... there is no employment for them;" [135] and further, that during the active times they "are subject to broken days and to
all kinds of interruptions." [136]

These results of the agricultural revolution — i.e., the change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous economy
of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model landlords, who, instead
of spending their rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on their
demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be broken, these gentlemen
draw their "labour-supply ... chiefly from their small tenants, who are obliged to
attend when required to do the landlord's work, at rates of wages, in many instances,
considerably under the current rates paid to ordinary labourers, and without regard
to the inconvenience or loss to the tenant of being obliged to neglect his own business
at critical periods of sowing or reaping." [137]

The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration
of gluts of labour, all these symptoms of a relative surplus-population, figure therefore
in the reports of the Poor Law administration, as so many hardships of the agricultural
proletariat. It will be remembered that we met, in the English agricultural proletariat,
with a similar spectacle. But the difference is that in England, an industrial country,
the industrial reserve recruits itself from the country districts, whilst in Ireland,
an agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself from the towns,
the cities of refuge of the expelled agricultural, labourers. In the former, the supernumeraries
of agriculture are transformed into factory operatives; in the latter, those forced
into the towns, whilst at the same time they press on the wages in towns, remain agricultural
labourers, and are constantly sent back to the country districts in search of work.

The official inspectors sum up the material condition of the agricultural labourer
as follows: "Though living with the strictest frugality, his own wages are barely
sufficient to provide food for an ordinary family and pay his rent" and he depends
upon other sources for the means of clothing himself, his wife, and children.... The
atmosphere of these cabins, combined with the. other privations they are subjected
to, has made this class particularly susceptible to low fever and pulmonary consumption."
[138] After this, it is no wonder that, according to the unanimous testimony of the inspectors,
a sombre discontent runs through the ranks of this class, that they long for the return
of the past, loathe the present, despair of the future, give themselves up "to the
evil influence of agitators," and have only one fixed idea, to emigrate to America.
This is the land of Cockaigne, into which the great Malthusian panacea, depopulation,
has transformed green Erin.

What a happy life the Irish factory operative leads one example will show: "On my
recent visit to the North of Ireland," says the English Factory Inspector, Robert
Baker, "I met with the following evidence of effort in an Irish skilled workman to
afford education to his children; and I give his evidence verbatim, as I took it from
his mouth. That he was a skilled factory hand, may be understood when I say that he
was employed on goods for the Manchester market. 'Johnson. — I am a beetler and work
from 6 in the morning till 11 at night, from Monday to Friday. Saturday we leave off
at 6 p. m., and get three hours of it (for meals and rest). I have five children in
all. For this work I get 10s. 6d. a week,; my wife works here also, and gets 5s. a
week. The oldest girl who is 12, minds the house. She is also cook, and all the servant
we have. She gets the young ones ready for school. A girl going past the house wakes
me at half past five in the morning. My wife gets up and goes along with me. We get
nothing (to eat) before we come to work. The child of 12 takes dare of the little
children all the day, and we get nothing till breakfast at eight. At eight we go home.
We get tea once a week; at other times we get stirabout, sometimes of oat-meal, sometimes
of Indian meal, as we are able to get it. In the winter we get a little sugar and
water to our Indian meal. In the summer we get a few potatoes, planting a small patch
ourselves;. and when they are done we get back to stirabout. Sometimes we get a little
milk as it may be. So we go on from day to day, Sunday and week day, always the same
the year round. I am always very much tired when I have done at night. We may see
a bit of flesh meat sometimes, but very seldom. Three of our children attend school,
for whom we pay 1d. a week a head. Our rent is 9d. a week. Peat for firing costs 1s.
6d. a fortnight at the very lowest.'" [139] Such are Irish wages, such is Irish life!

In fact the misery of Ireland is again the topic of the day in England. At the end
of 1866 and the beginning of 1867, one of the Irish land magnates, Lord Dufferin,
set about its solution in The Times. "Wie menschlich von solch grossem Herrn!"

From Table E. we saw that, during 1864, of £4,368,610 of total profits, three surplus-value
makers pocketed only £262,819; that in 1865, however, out of £4,669,979 total profits,
the same three virtuosi of "abstinence" pocketed £274,528; in 1864, 26 surplus-value
makers reached to £646,377; in 1865, 28 surplus-value makers reached to £736,448;
in 1864, 121 surplus-value makers, £1,076,912; in 1865, 150 surplus-value makers,
£1,320,906; in 1864, 1,131 surplus-value makers £2,150,818, nearly half of the total
annual profit; in 1865, 1,194 surplus-value makers, £2,418,833, more than half of
the total annual profit. But the lion's share, which an inconceivably small number
of land magnates in England, Scotland and Ireland swallow up of the yearly national
rental, is so monstrous that the wisdom of the English State does not think fit to
afford the same statistical materials about the distribution of rents as about the
distribution of profits. Lord Dufferin is one of those land magnates. That rent-rolls
and profits can ever be "excessive," or that their plethora is in any way connected
with plethora of the people's misery is, of course, an idea as "disreputable" as "unsound."
He keeps to facts. The fact is that, as the Irish population diminishes, the Irish
rent-rolls swell; that depopulation benefits the landlords, therefore also benefits
the soil, and, therefore, the people, that mere accessory of the soil. He declares,
therefore, that Ireland is still over-populated, and the stream of emigration still
flows too lazily. To be perfectly happy, Ireland must get rid of at least one-third
of a million of labouring men. Let no man imagine that this lord, poetic into the
bargain, is a physician of the school of Sangrado, who as often as he did not find
his patient better, ordered phlebotomy and again phlebotomy, until the patient lost
his sickness at the same time as his blood. Lord Dufferin demands a new blood-letting
of one-third of a million only, instead of about two millions; in fact, without the
getting rid of. these, the millennium in Erin is not to be. The proof is easily given.

Centralisation has from 1851 to 1861 destroyed principally farms of the first three
categories, under 1 and not over 15 acres. These above all must disappear. This gives
307,058 "supernumerary" farmers, and reckoning the families the low average of 4 persons,
1,228,232 persons. On the extravagant supposition that, after the agricultural revolution
is complete one-fourth of these are again absorbable, there remain for emigration
921,174 persons. Categories 4, 5, 6, of over 15 and not over 100 acres, are, as was
known long since in England, too small for capitalistic cultivation of corn, and for
sheep-breeding are almost vanishing quantities. On the same supposition as before,
therefore, there are further 788,761 persons to emigrate; total, 1,709,532. And as
I'appétit vient en mangeant, Rentroll's eyes will soon discover that Ireland, with
3 1/2 millions, is still always miserable, and miserable because she is over-populated.
Therefore her depopulation must go yet further, that thus she may fulfil her true
destiny, that of an English sheep-walk and cattle-pasture." [141]

Like all good things in this bad world, this profitable method has its drawbacks.
With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America
keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side of
the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen of the seas rises, threatening
and more threatening, the young giant Republic:

Acerba fata Romanos aguntScelusque fraternae necis.

Footnotes

[1] Karl Marx, l. c., "A égalité d'oppression des masses, plus un pays a de prolétaires
et plus il est riche." (Colins, "L'Economie Politique. Source des Révolutions et des
Utopies, prétendues Socialistes." Paris, 1857, t. III., p. 331.) Our "prolétarian"
is economically none other than the wage-labourer, who produces and increases capital,
and is thrown out on the streets, as soon as he is superfluous for the needs of aggrandigement
of "Monsieur capital," as Pecqueur calls this person. "The sickly proletarian of the
primitive forest", is a pretty Roscherian fancy. The primitive forester is owner of
the primitive forest, and uses the primitive forest as his property with the freedom
of an orang-outang. He is not, therefore, a proletarian. This would only be the case,
if the primitive forest exploited him, instead of being exploited by him. As far as
his health is concerned, such a man would well bear comparison, not only with the
modern proletarian, but also with the syphilitic and scrofulous upper classes. But,
no doubt, Herr Wilhelm Roscher, by "primitive forest" means his native heath of Lüneburg.

[3] Bernard de Mandeville: "The Fable of the Bees," 5th edition, London, 1728. Remarks,
pp. 212, 213, 328. "Temperate living and constant employment is the direct road, for
the poor, to rational happiness" [by which he most probably means long working-days
and little means of subsistence], "and to riches and strength for the state" (viz., for the landlords, capitalists, and their political dignitaries and agents). ("An
Essay on Trade and Commerce," London, 1770, p. 54.)

[4] Eden should have asked, whose creatures then are "the civil institutions"? From his
standpoint of juridical illusion, he does not regard the law as a product of the material
relations of production, but conversely the relations of production as products of
the law. Linguet overthrew Montesquieu's illusory "Esprit des lois" with one word:
" L'esprit des lois, c'est la propriété."

[6] If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose "Essay on Population" appeared in 1798,
I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish,
superficial plagiary of De Poe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c.,
and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation
this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had
found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the "principle of population," slowly
worked out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis,
proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of
Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer
of all hankerings after human development. Malthus, hugely astonished at his success,
gave himself to stuffing into his book materials superficially compiled, and adding
to it new matter, not discovered but annexed by him. Note further: Although Malthus
was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy
— one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University:
"Socios collegiorum maritos esse non permittimus, sed statim postquam quis uxorem
duxerit socius collegii desinat esse." ("Reports of Cambridge University Commission,"
p. 172.) This circumstance favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant
parsons, who have shuffled off the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and
have taken, "Be fruitful and multiply," as their special Biblical mission in such
a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really
unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the "principle
of population." It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam's apple,
the urgent appetite, "the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid," as Parson
Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by
the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church. With the
exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the
population-theory teachers are Protestant parsons. For instance, Bruckner, "Théorie
du Système animal," Leyde, 1767, in which the whole subject of the modern population
theory is exhausted, and to which the passing quarrel between Quesnay and his pupil,
the elder Mirabeau, fumished ideas on the same topic; then Parson Wallace, Parson
Townsend, Parson Malthus and his pupil, the arch-Parson Thomas Chalmers, to say nothing
of lesser reverend scribblers in this line. Originally, Political Economy was studied
by philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume; by businessmen and statesmen, like Thomas
More, Temple, Sully, De Witt, North, Law, Vanderlint, Cantillon, Franklin; and especially,
and with the greatest success, by medical men like Petty, Barbon, Mandeville, Quesnay.
Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Rev. Mr. Tucker, a notable economist
of his time, excused himself for meddling with the things of Mammon. Later on, and
in truth with this very "Principle of population," struck the hour of the Protestant
parsons. Petty, who regarded the population as the basis of wealth, and was, like
Adam Smith, an outspoken foe to parsons, says, as if he had a presentiment of their
bungling interference, "that Religion best flourishes when the Priests are most mortified,
as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when lawyers have least to do."
He advises the Protestant priests, therefore, if they, once for all, will not follow
the Apostle Paul and "mortify" themselves by celibacy, "not to breed more Churchmen
than the Benefices, as they now stand shared out, will receive, that is to say, if
there be places for about twelve thousand in England and Wales, it will not be safe
to breed up 24,000 ministers, for then the twelve thousand which are unprovided for,
will seek ways how to get themselves a livelihood, which they cannot do more easily
than by persuading the people that the twelve thousand incumbents do poison or starve
their souls, and misguide them in their way to Heaven." (Petty: "A Treatise of Taxes
and Contributions," London, 1667, p. 57.) Adam Smith's position with the Protestant
priesthood of his time is shown by the following. In "A Letter to A. Smith, L.L.D.
On the Life, Death, and Philosophy of his Friend, David Hume. By one of the People
called Christians," 4th Edition, Oxford, 1784, Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich, reproves
Adam Smith, because in a published letter to Mr. Strahan, he "embalmed his friend
David" (sc. Hume); because he told the world how "Hume amused himself on his deathbed
with Lucian and Whist," and because he even had the impudence to write of Hume: "I
have always considered him, both in his life-time and since his death, as approaching
as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as, perhaps, the nature
of human frailty will permit." The bishop cries out, in a passion: "Is it right in
you, Sir, to hold up to our view as 'perfectly wise and virtuous,' the character and conduct of one, who seems to have been possessed with an incurable antipathy to all that
is called Religion; and who strained every nerve to explode, suppress and extirpate the spirit of it
among men, that its very name, if he could effect it, might no more be had in remembrance?"
(l. c., p. 8.) "But let not the lovers of truth be discouraged. Atheism cannot be
of long continuance." (P. 17.) Adam Smith, "had the atrocious wickedness to propagate
atheism through the land (viz., by his "Theory of Moral Sentiments"). Upon the whole,
Doctor, your meaning is good; but I think you will not succeed this time. You would
persuade us, by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits, and the proper antidote against
the fear of death.... You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea." (l. c., pp. 21, 22.) One orthodox individual, amongst
Adam Smith's college friends, writes after his death: "Smith's well-placed affection
for Hume ... hindered him from being a Christian.... When he met with honest men whom
he liked ... he would believe almost anything they said. Had he been a friend of the
worthy ingenious Horrox he wouid have believed that the moon some times disappeared
in a clcar sky without the interposition of a cloud.... He approached to republicanism
in his political principles." ("The Bee." By James Anderson, 18 Vols., Vol. 3, pp.
166, 165, Edinburgh, 1791-93.) Parson Thomas Chalmers has his suspicions as to Adam
Smith having invented the category of "unproductive labourers," solely for the Protestant
parsons, inspite of their blessed work in the vineyard of the Lord.

[7] "The limit, however, to the employment of both the operative and the labourer is
the same; namely, the possibility of the employer realising a profit on the produce of their industry. If the rate of wages is such as to reduce the master's
gains below the average profit of capital, he will cease to employ them, or he will
only employ them on condition of submission to a reduction of wages." (John Wade,
l. c., p. 241.)

[8] Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to the Russian edition: The MS in the first
case says "little" and in the second case "much"; the correction has been introduced
according to the authorised French translation.

[10] "If we now return to our first inquiry, wherein it was shown that capital itself
is only the result of human labour... it seems quite incomprehensible that man can
have fallen under the domination of capital, his own product; can be subordinated
to it; and as in reality this is beyond dispute the case, involuntarily the question
arises: How has the labourer been able to pass from being master of capital — as its
creator — to being its slave?" (Von Thünen, "Der isolierte Staat" Part ii., Section
ii., Rostock, 1863, pp. 5, 6.) It is Thünen's merit to have asked this question. His
answer is simply childish.

[12]Note in the 4th German edition. — The latest English and American "trusts" are already striving to attain this goal
by attempting to unite at least all the large-scale concerns in one branch of industry
into one great joint-stock company with a practical monopoly. F. E.

[13]Note in the 3rd German edition. — In Marx's copy there is here the marginal note: "Here note for working out later;
if the extension is only quantitative, then for a greater and a smaller capital in
the same branch of business the profits are as the magnitudes of the capitals advanced.
If the quantitative extension induces qualitative change, then the rate of profit
on the larger capital rises simultaneously." F. E.

[14] The census of England and Wales shows: all persons employed in agriculture (landlords,
farmers, gardeners, shepherds, &c., included): 1851, 2,011,447; 1861, 1,924,110. Fall,
87,337. Worsted manufacture: 1851, 102,714 persons; 1861, 79,242. Silk weaving: 1851,
111,940; 1861, 101,678. Calico-printing: 1851, 12,098; 1861, 12,556. A small rise
that, in the face of the enormous extension of this industry and implying a great
fall proportionally in the number of labourers employed. Hat-making: 1851, 15,957;
1861, 13,814. Straw-hat and bonnet-making: 1851, 20,393; 1861, 18,176. Malting: 1851,
10,566; 1861, 10,677. Chandlery, 1851, 4,949; 1861, 4,686. This fall is due, besides
other causes, to the increase in lighting by gas. Comb-making — 1851, 2,038; 1861,
1,478. Sawyers: 1851, 30,552; 1861, 31,647 — a small rise in consequence of the increase
of sawing-machines. Nail-making: 1851, 26,940; 1861, 26,130 — fall in consequence
of the competition of machinery. Tin and copper-mining: 1851, 31,360; 1861, 32,041.
On the other hand: Cotton-spinning and weaving: 1851, 371,777; 1861, 456,646. Coal-mining:
1851, 183,389, 1861, 246,613, "The increase of labourers is generally greatest, since
1851, in such branches of industry in which machinery has not up to the present been
employed with success." (Census of England and Wales for 1861. Vol. Ill. London, 1863,
p. 36.)

[15]Added in the 4th German edition. — The law of progressive diminution of the relative magnitude of variable capital
and its effect on the condition of the class of wage-workers is conjectured rather
than understood by some of the prominent economists of the classical school. The greatest
service was rendered here by John Barton, although he, like all the rest, lumps together
constant and fixed capital, variable and circulating capital. He says:

"The demand for labour depends on the increase of circulating, and not of fixed capital.
Were it true that the proportion between these two sorts of capital is the same at
all times, and in all circumstances, then, indeed, it follows that the number of labourers
employed is in proportion to the wealth of the state. But such a proposition has not
the semblance of probability. As arts are cultivated, and civilisation is extended,
fixed capital bears a larger and larger proportion to circulating capital. The amount
of fixed capital employed in the production of a piece of British muslin is at least
a hundred, probably a thousand times greater than that employed in a similar piece
of Indian muslin. And the proportion of circulating capital is a hundred or thousand
times less ... the whole of the annual savings, added to the fixed capital, would
have no effect in increasing the demand for labour." (John Barton, "Obscrvations on
the Circumstances which Influence the Condition of the Labouring Classes of Society."
London, 1817, pp. 16, 17.) "The same cause which may increase the net revenue of the
country may at the same time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the
condition of the labourer." (Ricardo, l. c., p. 469.) With increase of capital, "the
demand [for labour] will be in a diminishing ratio." (Ibid., p. 480, Note.) "The amount
of capital devoted to the maintenance of labour may vary, independently of any changes
in the whole amount of capital.... Great fluctuations in the amount of employment,
and great suffering may become more frequent as capital itself becomes more plentiful."
(Richard Jones, "An Introductory Lecture on Pol. Econ.," Lond. 1833, p. 13) "Demand
[for labour] will rise... not in proportion to the accumulation of the general capital....
Every augmentation, therefore, in the national stock destined for reproduction, comes,
in the progress of society, to have less and less influence upon the condition of
the labourer." (Ramsay, l. c., pp. 90, 91.)

[19] Even in the cotton famine of 1863 we find, in a pamphlet of the operative cottonspinners
of Blackburn, fierce denunciations of over-work. which, in consequence of the Factory
Acts, of course only affected adult male labourers. "The adult operatives at this
mill have been asked to work from 12 to 13 hours per day, while there are hundreds
who are compelled to be idle who would willingly work partial time, in order to maintain
their families and save their brethren from a premature grave through being overworked....
We," it goes on to say, "would ask if the practice of working over-time by a number
of hands, is likely to create a good feeling between masters and servants. Those who
are worked over-time feel the injustice equally with those who are condemned to forced
idleness. There is in the district almost sufficient work to give to all partial employment
if fairly distributed. We are only asking what is right in requesting the masters
generally to pursue a system of short hours, particularly until a better state of
things begins to dawn upon us, rather than to work a portion of the hands over-time,
while others, for want of work, are compelled to exist upon charity." ("Reports of
Insp. of Fact., Oct. 31, 1863," p. 8.) The author of the "Essay on Trade and Commerce"
grasps the effect of a relative surplus-population on the employed labourers with
his usual unerring bourgeois instinct. "Another cause of idleness in this kingdom
is the want of a sufficient number of labouring hands .... Whenever from an extraordinary
demand for manufactures, labour grows scarce, the labourers feel their own consequence,
and will make their masters feel it likewise — it is amazing; but so depraved are
the dispositions of these people, that in such cases a set of workmen have combined
to distress the employer by idling a whole day together." ("Essay, &c.," pp. 27, 28.)
The fellows in fact were hankering after a rise in wages.

[21] Whilst during the last six months of 1866, 80-90,000 working people in London were
thrown out of work, the Factory Report for that same half year says: "It does not
appear absolutely true to say that demand will always produce supply just at the moment
when it is needed. It has not done so with labour, for much machinery has been idle
last year for want of hands." ("Rep. of Insp. of Fact., 31st Oct., 1866," p. 81.)

[22] Opening address to the Sanitary Conference, Birmingham, January 15th, 1875, by J.
Chamberlain, Mayor of the town, now (1883) President of the Board of Trade.

[23] 781 towns given in the census for 1861 for England and Wales "contained 10,960,998
inhabitants, while the villages and country parishes contained 9,105,226. In 1851,
580 towns were distinguished, and the population in them and in the surrounding country
was nearly equal. But while in the subsequent ten years the population in the villages
and the country increased half a million, the population in the 580 towns increased
by a million and a half (1,554,067). The increase of the population of the country
parishes is 6.5 per cent., and of the towns 17.3 per cent. The difference in the rates
of increase is due to the migration from country to town. Three-fourths of the total
increase of population has taken place in the towns." ("Census. &c.," pp. 11 and 12.)

[24] "Poverty seems favourable to generation." (A. Smith.) This is even a specially wise
arrangement of God, according to the gallant and witty Abbé Galiani "Iddio af che
gli uomini che esercitano mestieri di prima utiliti nascono abbondantemente." (Galiani,
l. c., p. 78.) "Misery up to the extreme point of famine and pestilence, instead of
checking, tends to increase population." (S. Laing, "National Distress," 1844, p.
69.) After Laing has illustrated this by statistics, he continues: "If the people
were all in easy circumstances, the world would soon be depopulated."

[27] "A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-wisher of Mankind. (The Rev. J. Townsend)
1786," republished Lond. 1817, pp. 15, 39, 41. This "delicate" parson, from whose
work just quoted, as well as from his "Journey through Spain," Malthus often copies
whole pages, himself borrowed the greater part of his doctrine from Sir James Steuart,
whom he however alters in the borrowing. E.g., when Steuart says: "Here, in slavery, was a forcible method of making mankind diligent,"
[for the non-workers] ... "Men were then forced to work" [i.e.,to work gratis for others], "because they were slaves of others; men are now forced
to work" [i.e., to work gratis for non-workers] "because they are the slaves of their necessities,"
he does not thence conclude, like the fat holder of benefices, that the wage-labourer
must always go fasting. He wishes, on the contrary, to increase their wants and to
make the increasing number of their wants a stimulus to their labour for the "more
delicate."

[33] These figures are sufficient for comparison, but, taken absolutely, are false, since,
perhaps, £100,000,000 of income are annually not declared. The complaints of the Inland
Revenue Commissioners of systematic fraud, especially on the part of the commercial
and industrial classes, are repeated in each of their reports. So e.g., "A Joint-stock company returns £6,000 as assessable profits, the surveyor raises
the amount to £88,000, and upon that sum duty is ultimately paid. Another company
which returns £190,000 is finally compelled to admit that the true return should be
£250,000." (Ibid., p, 42.)

[34] "Census, &c.," l. c., p. 29. John Bright's assertion that 150 landlords own half
of England, and 12 half the Scotch soil, has never been refuted.

[36] These are the net incomes after certain legally authorised abatements.

[37] At this moment, March, 1867, the Indian and Chinese market is again overstocked by
the consignments of the British cotton manufacturers. In 1866 a reduction in wages
of 5 per cent. took place amongst the cotton operatives. In 1867, as consequence of
a similar operation, there was a strike of 20,000 men at Preston. [Added in the 4th German edition. — That was the prelude to the crisis which broke out immediately afterwards.
— F. E.]

[39] Gladstone in the House of Commons, Feb. 13th, 1843. Times, Feb. 14th, 1843 — "It is one of the most melancholy features in the social state
of this country that we see, beyond the possibility of denial, that while there is
at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase of the
pressure of privations and distress; there is at the same time a constant accumulation
of wealth in the upper classes, an increase of the luxuriousness of their habits,
and of their means of enjoyment." (Hansard, 13th Feb.)

[40] Gladstone in the House of Commons, April 16th, 1863. Morning Star, April 17th.

[41] See the official accounts in the Blue book: "Miscellaneous Statistics of the United
Kingdom," Part vi., London, 1866, pp. 260-273, passim. Instead of the statistics of
orphan asylums, &c., the declamations of the ministerial journals in recommending
dowries for the Royal children might also serve. The greater dearness of the means
of subsistence is never forgotten there.

[42] Gladstone, House of Commons, 7th April, 1864. — "The Hansard version runs: 'Again,
and yet more at large — what is human life, but, in the majority of cases, a struggle
for existence.' The continual crying contradictions in Gladstone's Budget speeches
of 1863 and 1864 were characterised by an English writer by the following quotation
from Boileau:

[45] A peculiar light is throwm on the advance made since the time of Adam Smith, by the
fact that by him the word "workhouse" is still occasionally used as synonymous with
"manufactory"; e.g., the opening of his chapter on the division of labour; "those employed in every
different branch of the work can often be collected into the same workhouse."

[52] "In no particular have the rights of persons been so avowedly and shamefully sacrificed to the rights of property as in regard to the lodging of the labouring class. Every large town may be looked
upon as a place of human sacrifice, a shrine where thousands pass yearly through the
fire as offerings to the moloch of avarice," S. Laing, l. c., p. 150.

[54] l. c., p. 89. With reference to the children in these colonies, Dr. Hunter says:
"People are not now alive to tell us how children were brought up before this age
of dense agglomerations of poor began, and he would be a msh prophet who should tell
us what future behaviour is to be expected from the present growth of children, who,
under circumstances probably never before paralleled in this country, are now completing
their education for future practice, as 'dangerous classes' by sitting up half the
night with persons of every age, half naked, drunken, obscene, and quarrelsome." (l.
c., p. 56.)

[69] l. c., p. 18, Note. — The Relieving Officer of the Chapel-en-le-Frith Union reported
to the Registar-General as follows: — "At Doveholes, a number of small excavations
have been made into a large hillock of lime ashes (the refuse of lime-kilns), and
which are used as dwellings, and occupied by labourers and others employed in the
construction of a railway now in course of construction through that neighbourhood.
The excavations are small and damp, and have no drains or privies about them, and
not the slightest means of ventilation except up a hole pulled through the top, and
used for a chimney. In consequence of this defect, small-pox has been raging for some
time, and some deaths [amongst the troglodytes] have been caused by it." (l. c., note
2.)

[70] The details given at the end of Part IV. refer especially to the labourers in coal
mines. On the still worse condition in metal mines, see the very conscientious Report
of the Royal Commission of 1864.

[74] "Wholesale starvation of the London Poor.... Within the last few days the walls of
London have been placarded with large posters, bearing the following remarkable announcement:
— 'Fat oxen! Starving men! The fat oxen from their palace of glass have gone to feed
the rich in their luxurious abode, while the starving men are left to rot and die
in their wretched dens.' The placards bearing these ominous words are put up at certain
intervals. No sooner has one set been defaced or covered over, than a fresh set is
placarded in the former, or some equally public place.... This ... reminds one of
the secret revolutionary associations which prepared the French people for the events
of 1789.... At this moment, while English workmen with their wives and children are
dying of cold and hunger, there are millions of English gold — the produce of English
labour — being invested in Russian, Spanish, Italian, and other foreign enterprises."
—Reynolds' Newspaper, January 20th, 1867.

[75] James E. Thorold Rogers. (Prof. of Polit. Econ. in the University of Oxford.) "A
History of Agriculture and Prices in England." Oxford, 1866, v. 1, p. 690. This work,
the fruit of patient and diligent labour, contains in the two volumes that have so
far appeared, only the period from 1259 to 1400. The second volume contains simply
statistics. It is the first authentic "History of Prices" of the time that we possess.

[76] "Reasons for the Late Increase of the Poor-Rates: or a comparative view of the prices
of labour and provisions." Lond., 1777, pp. 5, 1 1.

[77] Dr. Richard Price: "Observations on Reversionary Payments," 6th Ed. By W. Morgan,
Lond., 1803, v. 11., pp. 158, 159. Price remarks on p. 159: "The nominal price of
daylabour is at present no more than about four times, or, at most, five times higher
than it was in the year 1514. But the price of corn is seven times, and of flesh-meat
and raiment about fifteen times higher. So far, therefore, has the price of labour
been even from advancing in proportion to the increase in the expenses of living,
that it does not appear that it bears now half the proportion to those expenses that
it did bear."

[78] Barton, l. c., p. 26. For the end of the 18th century cf. Eden, l. c.

[83] The landed aristocracy advanced themselves to this end, of course per Parliament,
funds from the State Treasury, at a very low rate of interest, which the farmers have
to make good at a much higher rate.

[85] The decrease of the middle-class farmers can be seen especially in the census category:
"Farmer's son, grandson, brother, nephew, daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece";
in a word, the members of his own family, employed by the farmer. This category numbered,
in 1851, 216,851 persons; in 1861, only 176,151. From 1851 to 1871, the farms under
20 acres fell by more than 900 in number; those between 50 and 75 acres fell from
8,253 to 6,370; the same thing occurred with all other farms under 100 acres. On the
other hand, during the same twenty years, the number of large farms increased; those
of 300-500 acres rose from 7,771 to 8,410, those of more than 500 acres from 2,755
to 3,914, those of more than 1,000 acres from 492 to 582.

[89] "Public Health. Seventh Report," 1865, p. 242. It is therefore nothing unusual either
for the landlord to raise a labourer's rent as soon as he hears that he is earnitig
a little more, or for the farmer to lower the wage of the labourer, "because his wife
has found a trade," l. c.

[99] l. c., p. 17. The English agricultural labourer receives only 1/4 as much milk, and
1/2 as much bread as the Irish. Arthur Young in his "Tour in Ireland," at the beginning
of this century, already noticed the better nourishment of the latter. The reason
is simply this, that the poor Irish farmer is incomparably more humane than the rich
English. As regards Wales, that which is said in the text holds only for the southwest.
All the doctors there agree that the increase of the death-rate through tuberculosis,
scrofula, etc., increases in intensity with the deterioration of the physical condition
of the population, and all ascribe this deterioration to poverty. "His (the farm labourer's)
keep is reckoned at about five pence a day, but in many districts it was said to be
of much less cost to the farmer" [himself very poor].... "A morsel of the salt meat
or bacon, ... salted and dried to the texture of mahogany, and hardly worth the difficult
process of assimilation ... is used to flavour a large quantity of broth or gruel,
of meal and leeks, and day after day this is the labourer's dinner." The advance of
industry resulted for him, in this harsh and damp climate, in "the abandonment of
the solid homespun clothing in favour of the cheap and so-called cotton goods," and
of stronger drinks for so-called tea. "The agriculturist, after several hours' exposure
to wind and rain, pins his cottage to sit by a fire of peat or of balls of clay and
small coal kneaded together, from which volumes of carbonic and sulphurous acids are
poured forth. His walls are of mud and stones, his floor the bare earth which was
there before the hut was built, his roof a mass of loose and sodden thatch. Every
crevice is topped to maintain warmth, and in an atmosphere of diabolic odour, with
a mud fioor, with his only clothes drying on his back, he often sups and sleeps with
his wife and children. Obstetricians who have passed parts of the night in such cibins
have described how they found their feet sinking in the mud of the floor, and they
were forced (easy task) to drill a hole through the wall to effect a little private
respiration. It was attested by numerous witnesses in various grades of life, that
to these insanitary influences, and many more, the underfed peasant was nightly exposed,
and of the result, a debilitated and scrofulous people, there was no want of evidence....
The statements of the relieving officers of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire show
in a striking way the same state of things. There is besides "a plague more horrible
still, the great number of idiots." Now a word on the climatic conditions. "A strong
south-west wind blows over the whole country for 8 or 9 months in the year, bringing
with it torrents of rain, which discharge principally upon the western slopes of the
hills. Trees are rare, except in sheltered places, and where not protected, are blown
out of all shape. The cottages generally crouch under some bank, or often in a ravine
or quarry, and none but the smallest sheep and native cattle can live on the pastures....
The young people migrate to the eastern mining districts of Glamorgan and Monmouth.
Carmarthenshire is the breeding ground of the mining population and their hospital.
The population can therefore barely maintain its numbers." Thus in Cardiganshire:

[100] In 1865 this law was improved to some extent. It will soon be learnt from experience
that tinkering of this sort is of no use.

[101] In order to understand that which follows, we must remember that "Close Villages"
are those whose owners are one or two large landlords. "Open villages," those whose
soil belongs to many smaller landlords. It is in the latter that building speculators
can build cottages and lodging-houses.

[102] A show-village of this kind looks very nice, but is as unreal as the villages that
Catherine II. saw on her journey to the Crimea. In recent times the shepherd, also
has often been banished from these show-villages; e.g., near Market Harboro is sheep-farm of about 500 acres, which only employs the labour
of one man. To reduce the long trudges over these wide plains, the beautiful pastures
of Leicester and Northampton, the shepherd used to get a cottage on the farm. Now
they give him a thirteenth shilling a week for lodging, that he must find far away
in an open village.

[103] "The labourers' houses (in the open villages, which, of course, are always overcrowded)
are usually in rows, built with their backs against the extreme edge of the plot of
land which the builder could call his, and on this account are not allowed light and
air, except from the front." (Dr. Hunter's Report, l. c., p. 135.) Very often the
beerseller or grocer of the village is at the same time the letter of its houses.
In this case the agricultural labourer finds in him a second master, besides the farmer.
He must be his customer as well as his tenant. "The hind with his 10s. a week, minus
a rent of £4 a year ... is obliged to buy at the seller's own terms, his modicum of
tea, sugar, flour, soap, candies, and beer." (l. c., p. 132.) These open villages
form, in fact, the "penal settlements" of the English agricultural proletariat. Many
of the cottages are simply lodging-houses, through which all the rabble of the neighbourhood
passes. The country labourer and his family who had often, in a way truly wonderful,
preserved, under the foulest conditions, a thoroughness and purity of character, go,
in these, utterly to the devil. It is, of course, the fashion amongst the aristocratic
shylocks to shrug their shoulders pharisaically at the building speculators, the small
landlords, and the open villages. They know well enough that their "close villages"
and "show-villages" are the birth-places of the open villages, and could not exist
without them. "The labourers ... were it not for the small owners, would, for by far
the most part, have to sleep under the trees of the farms on which they work." (l.
c., p. 135.) The system of "open" and "closed" villages obtains in all the Midland
counties and throughout the East of England.

[104] "The employer ... is ... directly or indirectly securing to himself the profit on
a man employed at 10s. a week, and receiving from this poor hind £4 or £5 annual rent
for houses not worth £20 in a really free market, but maintained at their artificial
value by the power of the owner to say 'Use my house, or go seek a hiring elsewhere
without a character from me....' Does a man wish to better himself, to go as a plate-layer
on the railway, or to begin quarry-work, the same power is ready with 'Work for me
at this low rate of wages or begone at a week's notice; take your pig with you, and
get what you can for the potatoes growing in your garden.' Should his interest appear
to be better served by it, an enhanced rent is sometimes preferred in these cases
by the owner (i.e., the farmer) as the penalty for leaving his service." (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.)

[105] "New married couples are no edifying study for grown-up brothers and sisters: and
though instances must not be recorded, sufficient data are remembered to warrant the
remark, that great depression and sometimes death are the lot of the female participator
in the offence of incest." (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 137.) A member of the rural police
who had for many years been a detective in the worst quarters of London, says of the
girls of his village: "their boldness and shamelessness I never saw equalled during
some years of police life and detective duty in the worst parts of London .... They
live like pigs, great boys and girls, mothers and fathers, all sleeping in one room,
in many instances." ("Child. Empl. Com. Sixth Report, 1867," p. 77 sq. 155.)

[107] "The heaven-bom employment of the hind gives dignity even to his position. He is
not a slave, but a soldier of peace, and deserves his place in married men's quarters
to be provided by the landlord, who has claimed a power of enforced labour similar
to that the country demands of the soldier. He no mote receives market-price for his
work than does the soldier. Like the soldier he is caught young, ignorant, knowing
only his own trade, and his own locality. Early marriage and. the operation of the
various laws of settlement affect the one as enlistment and the Mutiny Act affect
the other." (Dr. Hunter, l. c., p. 132.) Sometimes an exceptionally soft-hearted landlord
relents as the solitude he has created. "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in
one's country," said Lord Leicester, when complimented on the completion of Hookham.
"I look around and not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the giant of Giant Castle,
and have eat up all my neighhours."

[108] A similar movement is seen during the last ten years in France; in proportion as
capitalist production there takes possession of agriculture, it drives the "surplus"
agricultural population into the towns. Here also we find deterioration in the housing
and other conditions at the source of the surplus-population. On the special "prolétariat
foncier," to which this system of parcelling out the land has given rise, see, among
others, the work of Colins, already quoted, and Karl Marx "Der Achtzehnte Brumaire
des Louis Bonaparte." 2nd edition. Hamburg, 1869, pp. 56, &c. In 1846, the town population
in France was represented by 24.42, the agricultural by 75.58; in 1861, the town by
28.86, the agricultural by 71.14 per cent. During the last 5 years, the diminution
of the agricultural percentage of the population has been yet more marked. As early
as 1846, Pierre Dupont in his "Ouvriers" sang:

[113] "They (gangs) have greatly increased of late years. In some places they are said
to have been introduced at comparatively late dates; in others where gangs ... have
been known for many years ... more and younger children are employed in them." (l.
c., p. 79, § 174).

[114] "Small farmers never employ gangs." "It is not on poor land, but on land which affords
rent of from 40 to 50 shillings, that women and children are employed in the greatest
numbers." (l. c., pp. 17, 14.)

[115] To one of these gentlemen the taste of his rent was so grateful that he indignantly
declared to the Commission of Inquiry that the whole hubbub was only due to the name
of the system. If instead of "gang" it were called "the Agricultural Juvenile Industrial
Self-supporting Association," everything would be all right.

[116] "Gang work is cheaper than other work; that is why they are employed," says a former
gang-master (l. c., p. 17, § 14 )."The gang-system is decidedly the cheapest for the
farmer, and decidedly the worst for the children," says a farmer (l. c., p. 16, §
3.)

[117] "Undoubtedly much of the work now done by children in gangs used to be done by men
and women. More men are out of work now where children and women are employed than
formerly." (l. c., p. 43, n. 202.) On the other hand, "the labour question in some
agricultural districts, particularly the arable, is becoming so serious in consequence
of emigration, and the facility afforded by railways for getting to large towns that
I (the "I" is the steward of a great lord) think the services of children are most
indispensable," (l. c., p. 80, n. 180.) For the "labour question" in English agricultural
districts, differently from the rest of the civilised world, means the landlords'
and farmers' question, viz., how is it possible, despite an always increasing exodus of the agricultural folk,
to keep up a sufficient relative surplus-population in the country, and by means of
it keep the wages of the agricultural labourer at a minimum?

[118] The "Public Health Report," where in dealing with the subject of children's mortality,
the gang-system is treated in passing, remains unknown to the press, and, therefore,
to the English public. On the other hand, the last report of the "Child. Empl. Comm."
afforded the press sensational copy always welcome. Whilst the Liberal press asked
how the fine gentlemen and ladies, and the well-paid clergy of the State Church, with
whom Lincolnshire swarms, could allow such a system to arise on their estates, under
their very eyes, they who send out expressly missions to the Antipodes, "for the improvement
of the morals of South Sea Islanders" — the more refined press confined itself to
reflections on the coarse degradation of the agricultural population who are capable
of selling their children into such slavery! Under the accursed conditions to which
these "delicate" people condemn the agricultural labourer, it would not be surprising
if he ate his own children. What is really wonderful is the healthy integrity of character,
he has, in great part, retained. The official reports prove that the parents, even
in the gang districts, loathe the gang-system. "There is much in the evidence that
shows that the parents of the children would, in many instances, be glad to be aided
by the requirements of a legal obligation, to resist the pressure and the temptations
to which they are often subject. They are liable to be urged, at times by the parish
officers, at times by employers, under threats of being themselvat discharged, to
be taken to work at an age when ... school attendance ... would be manifestly to their
greater advantage.... All that time and strength wasted; all the suffering from extra
and unprofitable fatigue produced to the labourer and to his children; every instance
in which the parent may have traced the moral ruin of his child to fhe undermining
of delicacy by the over-crowding of cottages, or to the contaminating influences of
the public gang, must have been so many incentives to feelings in the minds of the
labouring poor which can be well understood, and which it would be needless to particularise.
They must be conscious that much bodily and mental pain has thus been inflicted upon
them from causes for which they were in no way answerable; to which, had it been in
their power, they would have in no way consented; and against which they were powerless
to struggle." (l. c., p. xx., § 82, and xxiii., n. 96.)

[120] The result would be found yet more unfavourable if we went further back. Thus: Sheep
in 1865, 3,688,742, but in 1856, 3,694,294. Pigs in 1865, 1,299,893, but in 1858,
1,409,883.

[121] The data of the text are put together from the materials of the "Agricultural Statistics,
Ireland, General Abstracts, Dublin," for the years 1860, el seq., and "Agricultural Statistics, Ireland. Tables showing the estimated average produce,
&c., Dublin, 1866." These statistics are official, and laid before Parliament annually.

Note to 2nd edition. The official statistics for the year 1872 show, as compared with 1871, a decrease
in area under cultivation of 134,915 acres. An increase occurred in the cultivation
of green crops, turnips, mangold-wurzel, and the like; a decrease in the area under
cultivation for wheat of 16,000 acres; oats, 14,000; barley and rye, 4,000; potatoes,
66,632; flax, 34,667; grass, clover, vetches, rape-seed, 30,000. The soil under cultivation
for wheat shows for the last 5 years the following stages of decrease: — 1868, 285,000
acres; 1869, 280,000; 1870, 259,000; 1871, 244,000; 1872, 228,000. For 1872 we find,
in round numbers, an increase of 2,600 horses, 80,000 horned cattle, 68,609 sheep,
and a decrease of 236,000 pigs.

[122] The total yearly income under Schedule D. is different in this table from that which
appears in the preceding ones, because of certain deductions allowed by law.

[123] If the product also diminishes relatively per acre, it must not be forgotten that
for a century and a half England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without
as much as allowing its cultivators the means for making up the constituents of the
soil that had been exhausted.

[124] As Ireland is regarded as the promised land of the "principle of population," Th.
Sadler, before the publication of his work on population, issued his famous book,
"Ireland, its Evils and their Remedies." 2nd edition, London, 1829. Here, by comparison
of the statistics of the individual provinces, and of the individual counties in each
province, he proves that the misery there is not, as Malthus would have it, in proportion
to the number of the population, but in inverse ratio to this.

[125] Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922.

[126] According to a table in Murphy's "Ireland Industrial, Political and Social," 1870,
94.6 per cent. or the holdings do not reach 100 acres, 5.4 exceed 100 acres.

[127] "Reports from the Poor Law Inspectors on the Wages of Agricultural Labourers in Dublin,"
1870. See also "Agricultural labourers (Ireland). Return, etc." 8 March, 1861, London,
1862.

[141] How the famine and its consequences have been deliberately made the most of, both
by the individual landlords and by the English legislature, to forcibly carry out
the agricultural revolution and to thin the population of Ireland down to the proportion
satisfactory to the landlords, I shall show more fully in Vol. III. of this work,
in the section on landed property. There also I return to the condition of the small
farmers and the agricultural labourers. At present, only one quotation. Nassau W.
Senior says, with other things, in his posthumous work, "Journals, Conversations and
Essays relating to Ireland." 2 vols. London, 1868; Vol. II., p. 282. "Well," said
Dr. G., "we have got our Poor Law and it is a great instrument for giving the victory
to the landlords. Another, and a still more powerful instrument is emigration....
No friend to Ireland can wish the war to be prolonged [between the landlords and the
small Celtic farmers] — still less, that it should end by the victory of the tenants.
The sooner it is over — the sooner Ireland becomes a grazing country, with the comparatively
thin population which a grazing country requires, the better for all classes." The
English Corn Laws of 1815 secured Ireland the monopoly of the free importation of
corn into Great Britain. They favoured artificially, therefore, the cultivation of
corn. With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, this monopoly was suddenly removed.
Apart from all other circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great
impulse to the turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of
arms, and to the eviction of small cultivators. After the fruitfulness of the Irish
soil had been praised from 1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself
destined for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists, politicians,
discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to produce forage. M. Léonce de
Lavergne has hastened to repeat this on the other side of the Channel. It takes a
"serious" man, à la Lavergne, to be caught by such childishness.